Closed loop driving with CARLA and eCAL 🚗

This is a creativity challenge. We provide you with the CARLA Simulator and some interface code to Eclipse eCAL. Your task is to create something cool with it.

• You can use any programming language you want.
• You can use any sensor data you want.
• You can use any algorithm you want.
• You can use any hardware you want.
• You can use any software you want.
• You can use any library you want.
• You can use any framework you want.
• You can use any cloud service you want.
• You can use any machine learning model you want.
• You can use any data you want.

📚 About

Eclipse eCAL™ is a publish subscribe Middleware with the main focus on research and development of autonomous driving algorithms.

• A Publisher publishes data to a topic, identified by a name.
• A Subscriber subscribes to a topic, identified by a name. When it received data, it calls a callback function.

CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. It provides a realistic environment for testing and developing autonomous driving algorithms.

• It provides a variety of sensors and weather conditions to simulate real-world scenarios.
• It also supports different types of vehicles and pedestrians.
• We provide you with a bridge between CARLA and eCAL.

👾 Hack Ideas

• Detect pedestrians from the camera image and track them.
• Steer the vehicle to follow a lane.
• Use the Google gesture recognition model to control the vehicle.

💻 Requirements

• A rather powerful GPU is required to run CARLA
• Programming languages
  • Recommended: Python or C++
  • Other options: C, C#, JavaScript, Rust

We recommend using Windows or Ubuntu. MacOS may work too, but eCAL is poorly tested on that OS.

👨‍🏫 Hack-Coaches

• Kerstin Keller
• Florian Reimold
• Kristof Hannemann
• Rex Schilasky

🛠 Template Setup

1. Download and setup Eclipse eCAL:

   • 🐧 Ubuntu:

     sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ecal/ecal-latest
     sudo apt-get update
     sudo apt-get install ecal

   • 🪟 Windows:

     • Download the latest release from https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/_download_archive/download_archive.html

2. Setup CARLA:

   • https://carla.readthedocs.io/en/latest/start_quickstart/

3. Setup example repositories:

   python -m venv .venv
   
   # on Linux
   source .venv/bin/activate
   # on Windows
   .venv/Scripts/activate.ps1
   
   pip install -r ./requirements.txt

   Then go ahead, download the eCAL Python wheel for your platform from the Release page, corresponding to your Python version and operating system, and install it via pip, too. If you are on Windows, using Python 3.9, 64bit, your wheel would be ecal5-5.12.1-cp39-cp39-win_amd64.whl.

   pip install ./ecal5-5.12.1-cp39-cp39-win_amd64.whl
   

   This gives you an environment that has all relevant components to start experimenting with eCAL and Carla.

👀 All necessary links

Eclipse eCAL:

• 🏠 Homepage: http://ecal.io
• 👨‍💻 GH Repository: https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal
• 💡 How to compile eCAL: https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/development/building_ecal_from_source.html

CARLA:

• 🏠 Homepage: https://carla.org/

Foxglove Studio:

• = Tool for visualization
• 🏠 Homepage: https://foxglove.dev/
• 👨‍💻 eCAL Foxglove Bridge: https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal-foxglove-bridge