ROS-Embedded LiDAR Perception in CARLA with AGL Visualization

What this project is

Modern cars are full of sensors. One of the most important is LiDAR — a spinning laser that measures the distance to everything around the vehicle, producing a 3D point cloud of the world. Software then turns that cloud into something useful: “there's a car 12 metres ahead, a pedestrian to the left.” Finally, the dashboard draws it on a screen so the driver (or the system) can see what the car sees.

This project builds that whole journey — but in simulation, so it can be developed and tested without a physical car:

Each box is a real, separate technology, and getting them to talk to each other — cleanly, reproducibly, and under real-world constraints — is the heart of the work.

The building blocks

• CARLA — an open-source autonomous-driving simulator built on Unreal Engine. It provides the virtual world, the car, and the sensors.
• ROS2 — the robotics middleware that moves sensor data and detections between programs as “topics.”
• AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) — the Linux distribution that actually runs in production car infotainment and instrument clusters. This is the target display platform.
• rosbridge — a server that re-publishes ROS2 topics as plain WebSocket + JSON, so a non-ROS client (like a car dashboard app) can read them.
• The AGL HMI application — the dashboard application that connects to rosbridge and renders the data on screen.

The ideal setup vs. what we built

It's worth being honest about the gap between the textbook deployment and the one we could actually run. The ideal is three machines, each doing the job it's suited for, on a real network:

We couldn't reach that: the target single-board computer (a Raspberry Pi 4B) wouldn't boot due to a hardware fault — a Jetson Nano has since been ordered as its replacement — and the only machine large enough to run CARLA was the GPU-less server. So everything collapsed onto one box, with AGL emulated in QEMU and a lightweight custom bridge. The table shows what's faithful to the goal and what is still a stand-in:

Progress log

This site documents the work in order. Start at Community Bonding and follow through the weeks.