Introduction — whiteboard for driving scenarios
drawtonomy is a whiteboard for driving scenarios. The kind of figure you put in a paper, the slide you sketch before a design review, the diagram you draw on a call when you’re explaining a corner case to the rest of the team, or the scene you sketch out before writing the OpenSCENARIO file.
Lanes, intersections, vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, road markings, and crosswalks are built-in shapes. Lanes are topology-aware — they carry Next / Previous / Left / Right connections — so the diagram is a network you can edit, not a picture you redraw whenever the road geometry changes.
The app is at drawtonomy.com. The SDK, extensions, and source for this docs site are on GitHub.
What people use it for
Section titled “What people use it for”- Figures for papers, theses, and technical reports. Vector
output (
drawtonomy.svg, PDF, EPS) that embeds cleanly in LaTeX, Markdown, and slide decks. - Slides and presentations. Diagrams of lane-change manoeuvres, intersections, occlusion cases, and other driving scenarios — drawn in seconds rather than minutes per shape.
- Design and algorithm discussions. A shared sketch surface for talking through driving behaviour, edge cases, and safety arguments with teammates.
- Scenario authoring. Sketch the scene before writing
OpenSCENARIO XML, or import an existing
.xoscand edit it visually. - Map and ROS annotation. Trace lanes over a satellite background, edit Lanelet2 OSM maps, or annotate a ROS occupancy grid with paths and obstacles.
Who this is for
Section titled “Who this is for”- Autonomous-driving and ADAS engineers drawing diagrams for internal docs, design reviews, and incident write-ups.
- AV researchers and students producing figures for papers, theses, and conference talks.
- Scenario authors working with simulators like esmini, CARLA, or in-house tools.
- HD-map and Lanelet2 users sketching changes against an existing road network.
- ROS and robotics teams drawing on top of occupancy grids built with nav2, Cartographer, or Gmapping.
- Driving instructors and educators producing diagrams for teaching material.
- Tool builders extending the editor with new exporters, importers, or AI-assisted features through the extension SDK.
How this documentation is organised
Section titled “How this documentation is organised”The site follows the Diátaxis split. Pick the section that matches what you’re doing.
| Section | When to read it |
|---|---|
| Tutorials | You are new and want to learn by doing. |
| How-to guides | You know what to accomplish and need the steps. |
| Reference | You need to look up an exact fact — a shortcut, a format, an API. |
| Explanation | You want to understand why drawtonomy works the way it does. |
| Extending drawtonomy | You are building on top of drawtonomy. |
If you don’t know where to start, the Quickstart is five minutes from a blank canvas to an exported scene.