CARLA

Gold definitionUpdated Apr 2, 2026

Definition

CARLA is an open-source urban driving simulator designed for the development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems. It provides a flexible and realistic environment for generating diverse datasets and evaluating perception, planning, and control models in both open-loop and closed-loop setups.

At a glance

Executive summary

CARLA is an open-source simulator for self-driving cars, allowing researchers to safely test and develop AI models for autonomous vehicles. It creates realistic virtual environments to generate diverse training data and evaluate how well these AI systems perceive their surroundings and plan their movements.

TL;DR

CARLA is a virtual city environment where self-driving car AI can be safely developed, tested, and trained using realistic simulations.

Key points

Provides a high-fidelity, open-source urban driving simulation environment.
Solves the problem of safely and cost-effectively testing autonomous driving systems and generating diverse datasets.
Used by autonomous driving researchers, ML engineers, and academic institutions for development and evaluation.
Offers a safer, more controllable, and reproducible alternative to real-world autonomous vehicle testing.
A growing trend as a platform for adversarial robustness research, multi-agent system development, and addressing long-tail problems in autonomous driving.

Use cases

Developing and validating new perception algorithms (e.g., object detection, semantic segmentation) for self-driving cars.
Evaluating and refining planning and control strategies for autonomous vehicles in diverse traffic and weather conditions.
Generating large-scale synthetic datasets with ground truth labels for training vision-language models and other AI components.
Benchmarking autonomous driving systems on standardized challenges like the CARLA Leaderboard 2.0.
Investigating and mitigating adversarial attacks on autonomous driving perception systems in a controlled environment.

Also known as

CARLA Simulator