A Unity Pipeline for Procedural Generation of Real-World and Synthetic Environments for Cycling Research

Srinivas, Chinmay; Vallery, Heike; Pena-Perez, Nuria

doi:10.18154/RWTH-2026-04918

A Unity Pipeline for Procedural Generation of Real-World and Synthetic Environments for Cycling Research

Srinivas, Chinmay^RWTH* ; Vallery, Heike^RWTH* ; Pena-Perez, Nuria (Corresponding author)^RWTH*

2026

Ausgabev1.0.0

Online
DOI: 10.18154/RWTH-2026-04918
URL: https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/1035492/files/osm2unity-1.0.0.zip
URL: https://github.com/rwth-irt/osm2unity

Einrichtungen

Lehrstuhl und Institut für Regelungstechnik (416610)

Projekte

AvH 1224379 - NLD - AHP - Alexander von Humboldt-Professur für Künstliche Intelligenz (1224379 - NLD - AHP) (1224379 - NLD - AHP)

Inhaltliche Beschreibung (Schlagwörter)
Cycling simulation (frei) ; OpenStreetMap (OSM) (frei) ; Procedural environment generation (frei) ; Unity (frei)

Kurzfassung
To facilitate the generation of interactive environments for cycling simulation, this project presents a Unity-based pipeline for procedural generation of both real maps from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database and synthetic maps. The pipeline integrates geospatial data parsing, terrain and road network reconstruction, and real-time simulation in a single workflow, enabling rapid creation of maps without manual modeling or external preprocessing. The produced 3D environments preserve key infrastructural features relevant to cycling, including complex road networks, elevation changes, and low-poly buildings. The system supports interactive navigation with a controllable bicycle agent via keyboard or VR controllers. We have evaluated the approach showing that both real-world maps and customized synthetic environments could be generated efficiently while maintaining simulation performance up to 60 FPS. Identified limitations include dependency on OSM data quality, elevation resolution, and the current restriction to simple building geometries and a limited set of semantic infrastructure types, with future work aiming to extend support for additional infrastructure types and further improve scalability.

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