Ask TRI if it is possible to have a car self-drive an arbitrary monolane

[Andrés Fortier]

Reach out to TRI on Slack to see if there is a way to load a monolane file and have a car placed in an arbitrary point of it to drive it randomly or from given points A to B.

[Michel Hidalgo]

@andres_fortier quick question, does the description implies autonomy (of the car going from one point to the other, as opposed to be given a sequence of positions)?

[Andrés Fortier]

Yes, the idea is to verify if there is a script / program were we can feed an arbitrary monolane file and a pair of points and have the car drive from one to another (or have the car drive around randomly)

[Michel Hidalgo]

After some short interaction through Slack, the conclusion is that, as of today, there's no out-of-the-box support for this yet. Nevertheless, a couple suggestions coming from Drake devs themselves are:

• To watch for updates in drake::automotive::MaliputRailCar (a link to Drake upstream is provided as we don't have these sources in our fork yet). This system currently drives along a single lane (no physical simulation involved though), but will soon be extended to keep going into on of the ongoing branches. At this point, implementing a random walk should be straightforward.
• To check for maliput::utility::InfiniteCircuitRoad used within the village-demo. If no (closed) path is given, it looks for a cycle in the road graph (segment -> edges, junctions -> nodes, if I understood correctly). Current implementation is quite naive, but it could be improved.

[Andrés Fortier]

Thanks for the summary @hidmic , I think we can close this one then.