AutoRally AN OPEN PLATFORM FOR AGGRESSIVE AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

AutoRally is an open-source, 1:5-scale autonomous vehicle testbed for students, researchers, and engineers who are interested in autonomous vehicle technologies. It is designed with robustness and ease of use in mind. At 1 m in length, weighing 22 kg, and with a top speed of 90 km/h, the platform is large enough to host powerful on-board computing and sensing and run state-of-the-art algorithms. At the same time, it is simple and small enough to be maintained and operated by two people, all while providing the capability of exploring driving scenarios including drifting, jumping, high-speed driving, and multivehicle interactions. Build instructions are publicly available, along with a parts list, computer-aided design models for fabricating custom components, and operating procedures. The platform uses the Robot Operating System (ROS) and can be programmed in Python or C++. Tutorials, reference algorithms, a Gazebo-based simulation environment, and a data set structured as ROS bag files are available from the AutoRally website. The fleet of six AutoRally platforms at Georgia Tech have been used to demonstrate control, perception, and estimation research in a high-speed, off-road driving domain. To date, the fleet has driven hundreds of kilometers autonomously at the Georgia Tech Autonomous Racing Facility.