CARMA, a program within the Federal Highway Administration, which is an agency inside the U.S. Department of Transportation, is an initiative focused on improving the transportation system by leveraging emerging automated driving technology and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology to enable increased safety and operational performance in moving people and goods through cooperative driving automation (CDA).
CARMA Platform is a software piece developed within the program that is installed on a vehicle to allow it operate with SAE ADS L3 functionality and SAE CDA Class A through D cooperation. Originally developed on ROS, we have started the process of migrating CARMA Platform to ROS 2 with Eclipse Foundation’s CycloneDDS as our ROS Middleware. CycloneDDS is is a Tier-1 RMW and the Autoware Foundation’s default for autonomous driving developers. Our team will be kicking off the development work for this shortly. The first release including initial code for CycloneDDS in CARMA Platform is planned for our ELISE release in April. We will be working with Autoware.Auto, ROS2 + CycloneDDS with built-in iceoryx throughout the year with a plan to complete migration to ROS 2 in our DIVO release in November 2021. Also noting that CycloneDDS & iceoryx are projects of Eclipse OpenADx autonomous driving WG.
We have also started the design for the CARMA Streets and have selected to use CycloneDDS’s sister project Eclipse Zenoh to support this infrastructure product. CARMA Streets is the part of CARMA that sits inside of the traffic signal cabinet and allows for vehicles to cooperate with intersection and with other CARMA Streets intersections along a corridor. Our team is starting work with Eclipse Zenoh in December/January to build the first iteration of CARMA Streets. The planned release of CARMA Streets will be in A1 release in June 2021. After the release of Eclipse Zenoh on CARMA Streets and as the ROS2 migration is coming along we will begin to look at this this software in supporting V2V activities in the fall. We just don’t have enough time with all the projects we have to deliver on along with this current migration. But it’s part of the plan and we are putting it in our backlog
CARMA roadmap here is updated monthly.
https://usdot-carma.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CET/pages/745111786/CARMA+Ecosystem+Roadmap
CARMA Source code can be found on GitHub
https://github.com/usdot-fhwa-stol
https://github.com/usdot-fhwa-stol/carma-1-tenth
We will begin to use our New ROS Discourse Channel for CARMA for discussions on all CARMA related development.