A Survey on Autonomous Driving System Simulators

Comprehensive and rigorous testing plays a critical role in ensuring the safety and reliability of automated driving systems (ADS), nonetheless, testing on the road is unsafe and costly. Simulation testing can solve the high cost and insecurity, but the performance of simulation testing is heavily dependent on, as well as limited by, the simulation platforms. This paper carries out an extensive comparison study on the commonly used simu-lation platforms in ADS testing. Advantages and disadvantages of the commonly used simulators such as CarSim, CarMaker and AirSim are compared from aspects like virtual environment generation, critical scenarios creation, types of supported sensor, as well as control of traffic participants.