JUPITER – ROS based Vehicle Platform for Autonomous Driving Research

During the development of state-of-the-art driver assistance systems and highly autonomous driving functions, there is a demand for reliable research vehicle platforms that can be used in a variety of applications. Especially for data-driven machine learning approaches, a large amount of measurement data obtained from multimodal sensors is needed. This paper presents a Robot Operating System (ROS) based prototype vehicle that is built on a Porsche Cayenne, which provides a dedicated test environment for autonomous research. To bridge the gap between pure research and actual production vehicles, the platform features near-series placement of sensors and the use of the built-in camera and actuators. Open-source packages and a containerized software architecture make the system reusable and easy to extend in terms of hardware and algorithms. Furthermore, we describe our approach for data recording and long-term persistence.