Papers › Pylot: A Modular Platform for Exploring Latency-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Autonomous Vehicles

Pylot: A Modular Platform for Exploring Latency-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Autonomous Vehicles

30 May 2021ICRA 2021 5archive 2025-07-28

Ionel Gog*, Sukrit Kalra*, Peter Schafhalter*, Matthew A. Wright Joseph E. Gonzalez Ion Stoica

We present Pylot, a platform for autonomous vehicle (AV) research and development, built with the goal to allow researchers to study the effects of the latency and accuracy of their models and algorithms on the end-to-end driving behavior of an AV. This is achieved through a modular structure enabled by our high-performance dataflow system that represents AV software pipeline components (object detectors, motion planners, etc.) as a dataflow graph of operators which communicate on data streams using timestamped messages. Pylot readily interfaces with popular AV simulators like CARLA, and is easily deployable to real-world vehicles with minimal code changes.To reduce the burden of developing an entire pipeline for evaluating a single component, Pylot provides several state-of-the-art reference implementations for the various components of an AV pipeline. Using these reference implementations, a Pylot-based AV pipeline is able to drive a real vehicle, and attains a high score on the CARLA Autonomous Driving Challenge. We also present several case studies enabled by Pylot, including evidence of a need for context-dependent components, and per-component time allocation. Pylot is open source, with the code available at https://github.com/erdos-project/pylot.

PaperPDFCode

Code

erdos-project/pylot mentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Autonomous DrivingAutonomous VehiclesCARLA MAP Leaderboard

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA Pylot Driving score 16.7 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA Pylot Infraction penalty 0.5 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
CARLA MAP Leaderboard CARLA Pylot Route completion 48.63 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CARLAEntropy RegularizationPPO

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections