A Lightweight Simulator for Autonomous Driving Motion Planning Development

A good simulation environment will facilitate motion planning algorithm development for urban autonomous driving. The first requirement of such a simulator is to be able to replicate a complex urban environment, including road network, curb, general objects, etc. The second requirement is to simulate a realistic host vehicle, which includes perception, control and vehicle dynamics, to recreate imperfect inputs and non-accurate execution of the planner. The third requirement is to model traffic participants (other on-road vehicles) for microscopic traffic simulation. Intelligent-agent-based techniques are used to allow the traffic participants to interact with the environment and each other. In this paper, we present an open-source lightweight simulation environment, FastSim, which is designed to meet the three requirements above.