Apollo Perception Standalone in ROS

Apollo is the most mature and sophisticated autonomous driving platform that is open source right now.

However, there are some limitations.

• Apollo (r3.0) is built upon a customized ROS environment, which is not compatible with normal ROS packages / plugins.
• Apollo (r3.5) abandons ROS and uses Cyber RT instead.
• If you want to understand their code and test it with your own application, you will need to have a good understanding of their framework before you can make any modifications.

Have you wondered, what if everything can be run as a standard ROS node and you can use all the familiar tools that are available in ROS? Then this repository is what you need!

Apollo Perception Architecture

Perception with demo-2.0.bag

The obstacle perception module in Apollo (r3.0) is extracted and modified so that it can be run as a normal ROS node. Everything is inside docker environment. Detailed steps of building and running the perception module are listed as follows.

Environment Information

The system is tested on Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and 1070 Max-Q. Please install Nvidia Driver, Docker, and Nvidia Docker.

Dependencies	Image Environment
Nvidia Driver (Tested on 384.130)	Ubuntu 14.04
Nvidia Docker (Tested on 2)	Cuda 8.0 + Cudnn 7

Building and Running

1. Clone Repository in Host

mkdir ~/shared_dir && cd ~/shared_dir
git clone https://github.com/cedricxie/apollo_perception_ros

2. Pull Dokcer Image
   docker pull cedricxie/apollo-perception-ros

3. Enter Docker Container
   cd ~/shared_dir/apollo_perception_ros && ./docker/run.sh

4. Make ROS Packages

cd ~/shared_dir/apollo_perception_ros/
catkin build
source devel/setup.bash

5. Launch Perception Node
   roslaunch vehicle_base detect_sim.launch

6. Playback Demo-2.0.bag from Apollo
   rosbag play demo-2.0.bag --clock
   The bag can be downloaded at Apollo Data Open Platform, Vehicle System Demo Data, with file name demo-sensor-data-apollo-2.0.tar.gz.