OpenDRIVE (ASAM)

OpenDRIVE is a standard by the ASAM association describing a road network the way autonomous driving simulators understand it: not just lines, but roads with lanes, their width, speed limits, junctions and the links between them. The .xodr file is XML, read by CARLA, esmini, RoadRunner and Vires VTD.

Exporting OSM into OpenDRIVE is what you need when a scenario has to be checked on the real geometry of a specific city rather than on a synthetic proving ground: an ADAS scenario prototype, a teaching task, a route demonstration in a simulator. A ready network appears in minutes instead of drawing roads by hand in an editor.

The implementation is simplified: the road plan is built from straight segments following the OSM geometry (arcs and clothoids are not used), the number of lanes, the road type and the speed are substituted by the highway tag (motorway, for example, gets three lanes and 110 km/h, residential gets one and 40), and the default lane width is 3.5 meters. Junctions are determined by clustering road ends: three or more within a five-meter radius become a junction with links between the incoming roads, and highway=traffic_signals points turn into signals. There is no elevation profile — the road is flat. That is enough for a prototype and for running a scenario in, but it is not an HD map of survey accuracy.