carla-simulator/carla

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

14328 stars · 4670 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research built on Unreal Engine, providing open digital assets like urban layouts, buildings, and vehicles. It supports development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems with configurable sensor suites, environmental conditions, and a flexible Python API.

Use cases

• simulate autonomous driving scenarios for research
• train reinforcement learning agents for self-driving cars
• test perception models with simulated LIDAR and camera data
• validate autonomous driving stacks on a benchmark leaderboard
• generate synthetic sensor data for computer vision
• run traffic scenario simulations with ScenarioRunner
• integrate a driving simulator with ROS

When to choose

• you need a high-fidelity driving simulator with open assets and sensor simulation
• you want to train or validate autonomous driving agents with LIDAR, cameras, GPS, and weather control
• you need ROS integration or multi-client server architecture for distributed simulation
• you want fast non-rendered simulation for planning and control research

When to avoid

• you need a lightweight simulator that runs on modest hardware (CARLA requires a high-end GPU and 32+ GB RAM)
• you need general-purpose robotics simulation beyond driving (consider Gazebo or Isaac Sim)
• you need game development tooling rather than a research simulation platform
• you require older OS support like Ubuntu 20.04 or Windows 10 for the UE5 version

Facets

application · maturity active

simulation machine-learning computer-vision deep-learning reinforcement-learning robotics autonomous-vehicles simulation robotics artificial-intelligence computer-vision deep-learning windows cpp python cross-platform autonomous-driving unreal-engine sensor-simulation lidar ros self-driving-car open-source-assets driving-benchmark research linux gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="carla-simulator/carla")