LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

The paper introduces LGSVL Simulator, a high-fidelity, customizable simulation platform designed for autonomous driving research, compatible with popular open-source stacks like Autoware and Apollo, reducing costs and enabling extensive testing.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, customizable, open-source simulator that supports full-stack autonomous driving testing and integration with existing autonomous vehicle software stacks.

Findings

Supports end-to-end simulation with Autoware and Apollo

Allows sensor customization and environment digital twins

Facilitates cost-effective autonomous vehicle testing

Abstract

Testing autonomous driving algorithms on real autonomous vehicles is extremely costly and many researchers and developers in the field cannot afford a real car and the corresponding sensors. Although several free and open-source autonomous driving stacks, such as Autoware and Apollo are available, choices of open-source simulators to use with them are limited. In this paper, we introduce the LGSVL Simulator which is a high fidelity simulator for autonomous driving. The simulator engine provides end-to-end, full-stack simulation which is ready to be hooked up to Autoware and Apollo. In addition, simulator tools are provided with the core simulation engine which allow users to easily customize sensors, create new types of controllable objects, replace some modules in the core simulator, and create digital twins of particular environments.