OpenCDA-ROS: Enabling Seamless Integration of Simulation and Real-World Cooperative Driving Automation

Autonomous driving (AD) and Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA) hold great promise for transforming mobility. However, current off-the-shelf AD or CDA platforms such as Autoware, Apollo, and CARMA, are subject to gaps between simulation and the real world and do not offer integrated pipelines for CDA research, development, and deployment. In this letter, we conceptualize OpenCDA-ROS, building on the strengths of an open-source framework OpenCDA and the Robot Operating System (ROS), to seamlessly synthesize ROS's real-world deployment capabilities with OpenCDA's mature CDA research framework and simulation-based evaluation to fill the gaps aforementioned. OpenCDA-ROS will leverage the advantages of both ROS and OpenCDA to boost the prototyping and deployment of critical CDA features in both simulation and the real world, particularly for cooperative perception, mapping and digital twinning, cooperative decision-making and motion planning, and smart infrastructure services. By offering seamless integration of simulation and real-world CDA, OpenCDA-ROS contributes significantly to advancing fundamental research, development, testing, validation, prototyping, and deployment of autonomous driving and CDA.