Lessons learned building a self-driving car on ROS

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of safe operation on urban roads are a complex problem that involves many subdomains of Robotics. This use case chapter presents the lessons that the authors learned while using the ROS framework to support the AV development efforts of Cruise, originally acquired by General Motors in 2016, and now an independent company. Scaling ROS to this level of complexity and team size brings an interesting viewpoint to its design decisions and can help guide the future direction of the community. After briefly introducing the hardware and software stack on a modern AV, the chapter begins with a discussion of ROS’ defining abstraction, publish/subscribe, and how it impacts system design and performance. Afterwards, we share our point of view about the complementary tools in the ROS ecosystem: visualization, data recording, and the build system. We conclude with the fundamental task of simulation and automated testing.