drawtonomy vs MATLAB Driving Scenario Designer
MATLAB Driving Scenario Designer
Section titled “MATLAB Driving Scenario Designer”The MATLAB Driving Scenario Designer is the interactive scenario-authoring app shipped with MathWorks’ Automated Driving Toolbox. It provides a canvas-based GUI for designing synthetic driving scenarios — road networks, ego and target vehicles, sensors — and is one of the standard tools for ADAS engineers already working inside MATLAB / Simulink.
What the Driving Scenario Designer covers:
- A scenario canvas for placing roads, lanes, vehicles, and pedestrians.
- An ego vehicle with attached sensors (camera, radar, lidar, ultrasonic, INS).
- A library of prebuilt scenarios representing common manoeuvres, including Euro NCAP test protocols.
- Generation of synthetic sensor data (object lists, lane detections) for development and testing.
- Bird’s-Eye Scope and time-series plots for verifying scenarios visually and through key signals.
- Tight integration with
drivingScenarioprogrammatic objects, so scenes can be built in the app and then refined in MATLAB code. - Export of OpenDRIVE 1.4 / 1.5 (for several road geometries) and bidirectional round-trip with Simulink.
For teams already standardised on MATLAB / Simulink, the Driving Scenario Designer is the kind of tool you would normally reach for to author scenarios that feed straight into your simulation pipeline.
Licensing
Section titled “Licensing”The Driving Scenario Designer ships with the Automated Driving Toolbox, which requires MATLAB and a separate toolbox license. Many universities provide access through campus-wide MathWorks licenses, so it’s worth checking whether your institution already includes it. Outside of MATLAB-licensed environments, it’s a paid license.
Where drawtonomy might fit alongside it
Section titled “Where drawtonomy might fit alongside it”drawtonomy is a browser whiteboard for driving diagrams. Per its exporter documentation, drawtonomy’s OpenDRIVE 1.8 / OpenSCENARIO 1.3 export covers a subset of the spec — it does not yet emit OpenDRIVE <junction> primitives or analytical clothoid geometry, and the OpenSCENARIO storyboard support is limited (no conditional triggers, parameter sweeps, or sensor models). It does not generate synthetic sensor data at all.
A few small places drawtonomy can sit alongside the Driving Scenario Designer:
- A MATLAB-free, browser-only canvas for sketching the scenario before it’s coded in MATLAB or used to drive an existing pipeline.
- A free figure source for slide decks, design reviews, papers, and blog posts about scenarios authored in the Driving Scenario Designer —
drawtonomy.svgembeds in LaTeX, Markdown, and slide tools without conversion. - A shareable visual link for collaborators who don’t have a MATLAB license, when the scenario itself remains the source of truth in MATLAB.
- An
esmini-ready zip for a quick playable check of the road geometry, separate from the full sensor / simulation pipeline.
A reasonable pattern when both are available: the Driving Scenario Designer for the scenario authored against your sensor model and simulation pipeline; drawtonomy for the diagram of it and for the version that needs to live in a paper, slide deck, or shared document.
In the same scenario-test ecosystem
Section titled “In the same scenario-test ecosystem”The Driving Scenario Designer, drawtonomy, RoadRunner, Truevision Designer, Blender DSC, scenariogeneration, and esmini all target — directly or indirectly — the same ASAM OpenDRIVE and OpenSCENARIO standards. The Driving Scenario Designer feeds the MATLAB / Simulink side of that ecosystem; drawtonomy sits on the browser-canvas side. Both are working on different parts of the same broader scenario-based-testing community.
For the standards themselves, see What is OpenDRIVE? and What is OpenSCENARIO?. For the conceptual framework that ADAS scenarios sit in, see Driving scenario classification.