Autonomous driving simulator for educational purposes

Interest in robotics field as a teaching tool to promote the STEM areas - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics has grown in the past years. The search for costless solutions to promote robotics is a major challenge and the use of real robots always increases associated costs. An alternative to this is the use of a simulator. The construction of a simulator related with the Portuguese Autonomous Driving Competition using Gazebo as 3D simulator and Robotics Operating System (ROS) as a middleware connection to promote, attract, and enthusiasm university students to the mobile robotics challenges is presented. The proposed simulator focus on the autonomous driving competition task, such as semaphore recognition, localization, and motion control. An evaluation of the simulator is also performed, leading to an absolute error of 5.11% and a relative error of 2.76% on best case scenarios relating to the odometry tests and an accuracy of 99.37% regarding to the semaphore recognition tests performed.