Vehicle and city simulation

2017-10-26

Autonomous vehicles, and the hardware and software required to operate these vehicles, are a hot topic of conversation. At Open Robotics, we thought it would be a great time to showcase Gazebo in the autonomous vehicle domain.

We built a fictitious world consisting of a handcrafted (via GIMP) terrain, and numerous freely available models on the Gazebo Model Database. Our vehicle of choice is a Prius Hybrid, the model of which consists of a power-train and full kinematic and dynamic simulation. Human models were also placed in the world to act as pedestrians.

You can find the source code for the city environment at https://bitbucket.org/osrf/citysim. This repository contains the world description, and a few plugins for traffic light control and visual effects.

The citysim code is a work in progress. It will be ready for public consumption when Gazebo 9 is released in January 2018.

While most of the capabilities required to run this demonstration exist in Gazebo8, we did leverage a few new capabilities, such as a joystick interface, that will appear in Gazebo9. Therefore, the citysim branch of Gazebo is also required.

Gazebo has many other tools and features to support autonomous vehicle testing and development. One such tool is real-time plotting of simulation data, as demonstrated in the following video.

Have fun simulating your world!