Running the Simulator

Drive the Bolt in CARLA with the same ROS 2 topics as the real car. CARLA runs on the sim server; you work from your Coder workspace.

You need an AVC Bolt workspace on Coder (on campus or the VPN).
Your workspace clones bolt-ros2 on its first start. If ~/bolt-ros2 is missing, add your Coder SSH key (Coder → Account → SSH Keys) to GitLab, then run bolt-clone.

1. Open your workspace

In Coder, open VS Code and Desktop. rviz shows up in the Desktop tab.

In a VS Code terminal:

uv run ~/bolt-ros2/sim/spawn_bolt.py --autopilot

This puts the Bolt and all its sensors in CARLA. Leave it running; Ctrl+C removes the car. Drop --autopilot if you want to drive it yourself.

In a second terminal:

cd ~/bolt-ros2 && docker compose run --rm dev

This opens a shell in the bolt-ros2 container and builds the code (the first time takes a few minutes). Then:

ros2 launch bolt2_launch bolt.launch.py mode:=sim rviz:=true

The sensors appear in rviz on the Desktop tab. To stop, press Ctrl+C in both terminals.

The sim publishes the same topics and TF as the car, so your code works on both:

Sensor	Topic
Lidars	`/sensors/lidar/<name>/velodyne_points`, `/sensors/lidar/ouster/points`
Cameras	`/sensors/cameras/<name>/image_raw`
Radars	`/sensors/radar/<name>/points`
GNSS / IMU	`/sensors/gnss/navsatfix`, `/sensors/gnss/imu`
Sim time	`/clock`

Sensor positions come from vehicle/src/bolt2_launch/cfg/sensors.yaml. On the car, the same launch file runs the real drivers: mode:=real.

Message	Fix
`The sim is already in synchronous mode`	Someone else is running the car. The sim is shared, so only one at a time.
`A vehicle with ros_name 'bolt' is already in the sim`	A run didn't clean up. Add `--replace` to take over.
Nothing in rviz	Check step 2 is still running, and that you only have one Desktop tab open.