// the find
autowarefoundation/autoware
Autoware - the world's leading open-source software project for autonomous driving
Autoware is the dominant open-source autonomous driving stack, built on ROS 2. It covers the full pipeline from sensor perception through planning to vehicle control, and is actively deployed in commercial robotaxi and delivery vehicle programs. This is for robotics/AV engineers with serious hardware and a real vehicle or high-fidelity simulator.
Active development with hundreds of contributors and daily commits to autoware_universe. Ansible-based environment setup handles the brutal CUDA/TensorRT/ROS 2 dependency chain better than most projects of this complexity. Docker and devcontainer configs give you a reproducible development environment without fighting Ubuntu versions. The modular architecture (core vs universe) means you can swap perception or planning components without rebuilding everything.
This is a meta-repo that just pins other repos via .repos files — the actual code lives in autoware_universe and a dozen other repos, so `git clone` gives you almost nothing useful without running the vcstool import step first. Hardware requirements are steep: you basically need a real AV sensor suite or AWSIM running on a GPU workstation to test anything meaningful. The Dockerfile is listed as the primary language, which tells you the repo itself is mostly glue — evaluating it without the upstream universe repo is like reading a package.json and thinking you understand the app. Documentation is decent but assumes you already know ROS 2 deeply.