English

CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator

Machine Learning 2017-11-13 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Robotics

Abstract

We introduce CARLA, 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. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an end-to-end model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform's utility for autonomous driving research. The supplementary video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Hp8Dz-Zek2E

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.03938,
  title  = {CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator},
  author = {Alexey Dosovitskiy and German Ros and Felipe Codevilla and Antonio Lopez and Vladlen Koltun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.03938},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Published at the 1st Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:42:27.208Z