A ROS-based Platform for Autonomous Vehicles: Foundations and Perception

Autonomous driving (AD) and Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) areat the forefront of today’s technical achievements in the field of automotive en-gineering, promising disruptive changes in the role of transportation in today’ssociety, and in the world’s economy in general. This endeavor is fueled by theproduction of new advances in research, and their swift and smooth transfer to theindustry. The present work aims at helping with the latter: it’s a software andhardware platform based on ROS (Robot Operating System) that aims to allowresearchers, students and companies in the field to share algorithms and data inthe most painless way. It provides a functionality baseline that includes sensorsupport, localization, SLAM, object and lane detection, and basic navigation capa-bilities. Moreover, modern practices in distributed systems engineering are appliedto allow users to easily monitor the system, diagnose problems, transfer and deploythe system’s components.