CommonRoad Scenario Designer GUI

The CommonRoad Scenario Designer is a graphical user interface (GUI), which integrates all currently developed converters with and functionalities to edit and create new maps and test scenarios for motion planning of autonomous vehicles.

Quick Start Guide

You can start the GUI via the command line:

Option1 : crdesigner

Option 2: crdesigner gui

You can also start the GUI by executing a Python file with python crdesigner/io/gui/commonroad_scenario_designer_gui.py

Fig. 4 Layout of the CommonRoad Scenario Designer.

Implementation Details

The GUI is based on Matplotlib and PyQt5 and contains several modules including the viewer module which is able to show videos, zoom in/out, and react on clicking.

The viewer module is designed to realize the visualization of a CommonRoad scenario. It consists of four classes responsible for different functionalities. All the visualization functions are developed based on Matplotlib. It is an open-source project based on the Python language, which aims to provide a comprehensive library for creating static, animated, and interactive visualizations for Python. It is built with the inspiration of MATLAB, which provides simple to use functionality for data plotting. But different from MATLAB, Matplotlib is completely designed using object-oriented methods, which are more suitable for GUI applications because object instances can be manipulated in the program.

As the GUI is based on PyQt5, the matplotlib API is needed to realize the scenario drawing under the QT framework. The FigureCanvasQTAgg is the area onto which the figure is drawn. In addition, the class QWidget of PyQt is one of its parent classes, so that the class FigureCanvas is actually a widget component used to display Matplotlib drawing results on the PyQt5 GUI. In another word, to display the Matplotlib drawing results on the PyQt5 GUI, a FigureCanvas component must be created. The Figure class is a chart class for drawing. It is the main class in Matplotlib, which is responsible for managing the drawing of various components in a graphics window. The Axes is a class that manages the drawing of an area, so that the Matplotlib drawing in the GUI happens mainly through the operation of the Axes class and its managed sub-objects, e.g., coordinate axes (Axis class) or curves (Line2D class). One or more Axes objects can be included in Figure object.