Getting started with CARLA

Welcome to CARLA

Important

This tutorial refers to the latest development versions of CARLA, 0.9.0 or later. For the documentation of the stable version please switch to the stable branch.

Welcome to CARLA! This tutorial provides the basic steps for getting started using CARLA.

Get the latest release

Download the latest release from our GitHub page and extract all the contents of the package in a folder of your choice.

The release package contains the following

  • The CARLA simulator.
  • The "carla" Python API module.
  • A few Python scripts with usage examples.

The simulator can be started by running CarlaUE4.sh on Linux, or CarlaUE4.exe on Windows. Unlike previous versions, now the simulator automatically starts in "server mode". That is, you can already start connecting your Python scripts to control the actors in the simulation.

CARLA requires two available TCP ports on your computer, by default 2000 and 2001. Make sure you don't have a firewall or another application blocking those ports. Alternatively, you can manually change the port CARLA uses by launching the simulator with the command-line argument -carla-port=N, the second port will be automatically set to N+1.

Tip

You can launch the simulator in windowed mode by using the argument -windowed, and control the window size with -ResX=N and -ResY=N.

Running the example script

Run the example script with

python example.py

If everything went well you should start seeing cars appearing in the scene.

We strongly recommend taking a look at the example code to understand how it works, and modify it at will. We'll have soon tutorials for writing your own scripts, but for now the examples is all we have.

Changing the map

By default, the simulator starts up in our "Town01" map. The second map can be started by passing the path to the map as first argument when launching the simulator

# On Linux
$ ./CarlaUE4.sh /Game/Carla/Maps/Town02
rem On Windows
> CarlaUE4.exe /Game/Carla/Maps/Town02