The Open Innovation Autonomous Vehicle Development and Testing Platform (OPINA), a collaboration between Republic of Turkey and the European Union, has introduced the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) middleware, enabling all AD applications on the OPINA platform to exchange data with simulation and test programs via the ROS2 bridge.

Led by the non-governmental Istanbul Okan University, OPINA is working to create an open ecosystem for the development of software and hardware modules for autonomous technologies.

The simulation and testing solutions Carla, designed for analyzing and evaluating real traffic scenarios, and IGP TruckMaker, which has dynamic simulation options, can now communicate with other applications in real time via the ROS2 bridge. This is possible simultaneously with different vehicles and with different sensor configurations, simulation landscapes or even weather conditions.

“Normally, both Carla and IPG TruckMaker are self-contained programs with a static configuration during run-time,” OPINA said in a statement. “The ROS2 bridge allows for dynamically changing the configuration. So both programs can interact with other software – or tests can be run in an automated setup – with slight changes from run to tun.”