OpenDRIVE: Introduction
What is OpenDRIVE
Truevision provides support for importing & describing road networks via OpenDRIVE. OpenDRIVE® files are designed to describe entire road networks with respect to all data belonging to the road environment. They do not describe the entities acting on or interacting with the road.
The OpenDRIVE file format provides the following features:
- XML format
- hierarchical structure
- analytical definition of road geometry (plane elements, lateral / vertical profile, lane width etc.)
- various types of lanes
- junctions and junction groups
- logical inter-connection of lanes
- signs and signals incl. dependencies
- signal controllers (e.g. for junctions)
- road and road-side objects
- user-definable data beads
- and more
Road Layout
The following figure depicts the principles of road layout:
Note: Support for OpenDRIVE version 1.4 & above is provided. Some of the OpenDRIVE tags are not supported.
Hello Road
In the section, we'll look to create our very first simple road using OpenDRIVE. You can create OpenDRIVE in two ways
- Using Truevision ScenarioDesigner
- Manually writing or modifying the XML
The ScenarioDesigner is a much easier way to design roads as you'll not need to know anything about OpenDRIVE and you can just visually create roads by clicking and changing and few properties etc.
Manually writing the XML file means you'll need to understand all the tags and elements in OpenDRIVE, which can be quite a long exercise depending on how deeply you want to understand the format. Instead of covering everything, we'll be covering some of the most important elements which will improve your speed to iterate without spending too much time.
Using Designer
Follow the screenshots below to create a simple road with multiple lanes.
Open Designer
Create Road
Add Lanes
Modify Lane Type
Modify Lane Width
Add Roadmarks
Modify Roadmarks
Export File
Now, you can just import the file in the simulator with import command