CoSAM: Co-Simulation Framework for ROS-based Self-driving Systems and MATLAB/Simulink

In recent year, autonomous vehicles have been developed worldwide. ROS, which is a middleware suitable for the development of a self-driving system, is rarely used in the automotive industry. MATLAB/Simulink, which is a development software suitable for Model-based development, is usually utilized. To integrate a program created with MATLAB/Simulink into a ROS-based self-driving system, it is necessary to convert the program into C++ code and adapt to the network of the ROS-based self-driving system, which makes development inefficient. We used Autoware as ROS-based self-driving system and provided a framework which realizes co-simulation between Autoware and MATLAB/Simulink (CoSAM). CoSAM enables developers to integrate the program created with MATLAB/Simulink into the ROS-based self-driving system without converting into C++ code. Therefore, CoSAM makes the development of the self-driving system easy and efficient. Furthermore, our evaluations of the proposed framework demonstrated its practical potential.