Simplifying Sim-to-Real Transfer in Autonomous Driving: Coupling Autoware with the CommonRoad Motion Planning Framework

Validating motion planning algorithms for autonomous vehicles on a real system is essential to improve their safety in the real world. Open-source initiatives, such as Autoware, provide a deployable software stack for real vehicles. However, such driving stacks have a high entry barrier, so that integrating new algorithms is tedious. Especially new research results are thus mostly evaluated only in simulation, e.g., within the CommonRoad benchmark suite. To address this problem, we present CR2AW, a publicly available interface between the CommonRoad framework and Autoware. CR2AW significantly simplifies the sim-to-real transfer of motion planning research, by allowing users to easily integrate their CommonRoad planning modules into Autoware. Our experiments both in simulation and on our research vehicle showcase the usefulness of CR2AW.