Autoware Toolbox: MATLAB/Simulink Benchmark Suite for ROS-based Self-driving Software Platform

Abstract

This paper describes a MATLAB/Simulink benchmark suite for an open-source self-driving system based on Robot Operating System (ROS). In recent years, self-driving systems have been developed worldwide, and the technology has been making remarkable progress. One approach to the development of the self-driving systems is the utilization of ROS which is an open-source middleware framework used for developing robot applications. On the other hand, the popular approach in the automotive industry is the utilization of MATLAB/Simulink which is the software for modeling, simulating, and analyzing. MATLAB/Simulink provides an interface between ROS and MATLAB/Simulink that enables to create functionalities of ROS-based robots in MATLAB/Simulink. However, it has not been fully utilized in the development of the self-driving systems yet because there are not enough open-source models for self-driving. Thus the co-development is difficult. Therefore, we provide a MATLAB/Simulink benchmark suite for a ROS-based self-driving system called Autoware. Autoware is popular open-source software that provides a complete set of self-driving modules. The provided benchmark contains MATLAB/Simulink models. They help to design the ROS-based self-driving systems using MATLAB/Simulink. Moreover, we investigated other benchmarks for self-driving and indicated that this is the first work aiming to the ROS-based self-driving systems with MATLAB/Simulink.