CPM Lab Documentation
Important
This documentation is a work in progress. Questions? Ask in our Slack community or via email, see Getting Help and FAQ.
What Is the CPM Lab?
The Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab) is an open-source testbed for research and teaching on networked and automated vehicles. Instead of full-size cars, it uses up to 20 muCars: vehicles at scale 1:18, modeled on a compact car, with Ackermann steering, an onboard computer and a real-time vehicle controller. They drive on a track of about 4 x 4.5 m whose roads are described as a Lanelet2 map. A camera above the track, the indoor positioning system, detects the LEDs on the vehicles and measures their poses. Because the vehicles are small, cheap and safe, experiments with many vehicles, dense traffic and close interactions are possible in a single room, and a planner can be tested on real hardware within minutes.
You bring the motion planner: a ROS2 node that receives the states of all vehicles and the map, and sends a command to every vehicle in each period. The lab does everything around it. A central workstation runs the control flow, which starts the map, the positioning system and the experiments on request, and the bridge, which connects your planner to the vehicles, makes sure every component is ready before an experiment starts and stops the vehicles when something goes wrong. Real and simulated vehicles behave the same for your planner and can be mixed, so you can develop on your own computer and then run the same code in the lab.
The original CPM Lab was built at RWTH Aachen University in 2017 and moved to the University of the Bundeswehr Munich in 2024. The current generation, documented here, is based on ROS2 and replaces the CPM Lab 1.0. Today, labs in Germany, South Africa, India and the United States follow the same setup, see About. If you use the CPM Lab in your work, please cite it, see Literature. This documentation describes CPM Lab 0.3.0.
Where to Start
Install the CPM Lab, run your first simulation, write your own motion planner and bring it to the real vehicles.
Set up the network, central workstation, camera and muCars, calibrate the camera and keep the lab up to date.
Architecture, design, workflow, tests and releases for everyone who changes the CPM Lab itself.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge the financial support for this project by the Collaborative Research Center / Transregio 339 of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Website last updated on 2026-11-10.