List of driving simulators

Last updated Jun 23, 2022

• Type list
• Status good

CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions.

• CARLA - Website
• CARLA - GitHub
• CARLA Autonomous Driving Challenge
• CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator - YouTube
• CARLA 0.9.10 - YouTube
• CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator - Arxiv

• Multimodal End-to-End Autonomous Driving
• Augmented LiDAR Simulator for Autonomous Driving

Racing Simulator, Camera stream, agent positions, testing control policies for vehicles

AirSim is a simulator for drones, cars and more, built on Unreal Engine (we now also have an experimental Unity release). It is open-source, cross platform, and supports software-in-the-loop simulation with popular flight controllers such as PX4 & ArduPilot and hardware-in-loop with PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations. It is developed as an Unreal plugin that can simply be dropped into any Unreal environment. Similarly, we have an experimental release for a Unity plugin.

Our goal is to develop AirSim as a platform for AI research to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. For this purpose, AirSim also exposes APIs to retrieve data and control vehicles in a platform independent way.

• AirSim Website
• AirSim Car Demo - YouTube

Multi-robot physics simulator employed for path planning & vehicle control in complex 2D & 3D maps

Macro-scale modelling of traffic in cities motion planning simulators are used

Driving simulator based on unreal, providing multi-camera (eight) stream with depth. Voyage Deepdrive is a simulator that allows anyone with a PC to push the state-of-the-art in self-driving.

• DeepDrive Website
• DeepDrive Github

NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation simulates camera, LIDAR and radar for autonomous driving (Proprietary)

MADRaS is a Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Simulator built on top of TORCS. The simulator can be used to test autonomous vehicle algorithms both heuristic and learning based on an inherently multi agent setting.

• MADRaS GitHub
• MADRaS Arxiv

Multi-Agent Traffic Control Simulator built on top of SUMO. Flow is a traffic control benchmarking framework. It provides a suite of traffic control scenarios (benchmarks), tools for designing custom traffic scenarios, and integration with deep reinforcement learning and traffic microsimulation libraries.

• Flow Website
• Flow GitHub

A gym-based environment that provides a simulator for highway based road topologies. A minimalist environment for decision-making in autonomous driving. A collection of environments for autonomous driving and tactical decision-making tasks.

• Highway-env Website
• Highway-env GitHub

Waymo’s simulation environment (Proprietary)

LG Electronics America R&D Center has developed an HDRP Unity-based multi-robot simulator for autonomous vehicle developers. It provides an out-of-the-box solution which can meet the needs of developers wishing to focus on testing their autonomous vehicle algorithms. It currently has integration with TierIV’s Autoware and Baidu’s Apollo 5.0 and Apollo 3.0 platforms, can generate HD maps, and can be immediately used for testing and validation of a whole system with little need for custom integrations.

• LGSVL Website
• LGSVL GitHub

The image is taken from: A Systematic Review of Perception System and Simulators for Autonomous Vehicles Research by Rosique et al.