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What's an appropriate tool for simulating a car driving in a simple closed-loop racetrack? I'm trying to implement the control logic for an autonomous vehicle, and I'd like to be able to first simulate the behaviour before testing on a physical platform. The target environment is mostly 2D, but there are some 3D obstacle like small ramps and arches, so I can't use a strictly 2D simulator.

I've looked at some robotics simulators, as listed here, but they seem like overkill and none of them seemed designed to model outdoor environments. I've done a little work with Gazebo, and I can't find any guide of texturing the ground/sky/background.

All I really need is some way apply a texture map to the ground and sky, create a handful of obstacles, and then to calculate a camera feed as a simple two-wheeled chassis moves along a mostly 2D course. However, I need the video input to be as realistic as possible because I don't have access to the real world racetrack. I need to be able to test and train the control logic in the simulator, and then load that logic onto the real mobile platform and have it navigate the course.

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This sounds similar to work my colleague did on high-speed vehicle control. He used TORCS (The Open Race Car Simulator). See this project page for a video, screenshots, and the published paper of his work.

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ZeroSim is an Open Source robotics simulation toolkit using Unity and ROS integration. There are is an example with differential drive autonomous robot, but no examples yet of a Ackerman steering controller -- though Ackerman steering shouldn't be too hard to implement. Because ZeroSim is using Unity it should be quite a bit easier to develop 3D environments then Gazebo and maybe even use one of the many examples of automobiles available via the Unity Asset Store or freely available elsewhere.

Disclosure: I am a developer for ZeroSim.

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