Current research in the field of autonomous driving, the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and new regulations for the safety of autonomous features require extensive testing in virtual environments and simulators. Roads, signals and road objects for driving simulators have to be modelled as close to reality as possible. A lot of time is necessary to collect data and model the road network, the landscape, vegetation as well as road signs and traffic lights.

Using a standard file format has the advantage of facilitating easy exchange between different simulation environments, applications, and companies. OpenDRIVE® is a standard to describe road networks, including maps, objects, surface properties and signaling. Particular specifications for certain driving simulators can be added via user defined tags.

To ease the creation of virtual driving simulator tracks, HLRS is developing the software ODDLOT. This simulation tool allows the user to load maps and draw roads in a 2-dimensional graphical interface using different prototypes, specified by the number of lanes, their width and road markings. Roads can be linked together, making it possible to manipulate the driving decisions of autonomous intelligent vehicles in the scene. Junctions can be created automatically by defining the area of intersection or manually in a specialized editor.

ODDLOT comes with a bundle of common German signals as well as Chinese signals to make the placement of signs easy. Different kinds of barriers are available, and new objects can also be described in an XML file. Tiles can be connected to build large networks, thereby reducing the modelling time by reusing already existing tiles in OpenDRIVE® Editor.

ODDLOT is part of COVISE, the Collaborative Visualization and Simulation Environment, an open source package (LGPL2+) available on GitHub. ODDLOT is adapting to the ongoing extensions of the OpenDRIVE® standard, making it possible to describe dynamically changing elements in the future.