Car development requires a lot of knowledge and researchers, so car manufacturers try to keep their findings away from uninvited eyes. But at times, some manufacturer nevertheless decides to share knowledge with others, which Toyota did recently.
In the Toyota Research Institute, they decided to donate 100 thousand US dollars for the development of an open source driving simulator. The simulator is called CARLA (Car Learning to Act), and serves to test autonomous driving systems in an urban environment. It is based on the Github software platform, which was developed by the Computer Vision Center, which operates at the Barcelona University.
The simulator will serve to develop a stable operation of autonomous vehicles and will be designed primarily for driving simulations in a wide range of traffic situations and environments that due to regulations or unreliability of autonomous driving systems in the initial stages of development cannot be carried out in a real environment, that is, on public roads. The simulator offers a broad variety of driving scenarios and can quite easily be adapted to the requirements of each project and its findings.