The Road Ahead in Autonomous Driving: The KITScenes Multimodal Dataset

The Boreas Road Trip (Boreas-RT) dataset extends the multi-season Boreas dataset to new and diverse locations that pose challenges for modern autonomous driving algorithms. Boreas-RT comprises 60 sequences collected over 9 real-world routes, totalling 643 km of driving. Each route is traversed multiple times, enabling evaluation in identical environments under varying traffic and, in some cases, weather conditions. The data collection platform includes a 5MP FLIR Blackfly S camera, a 360 degree Navtech RAS6 Doppler-enabled spinning radar, a 128-channel 360 degree Velodyne Alpha Prime lidar, an Aeva Aeries II FMCW Doppler-enabled lidar, a Silicon Sensing DMU41 inertial measurement unit, and a Dynapar wheel encoder. Centimetre-level ground truth is provided via post-processed Applanix POS LV GNSS-INS data. The dataset includes precise extrinsic and intrinsic calibrations, a publicly available development kit, and a live leaderboard for odometry and metric localization. Benchmark results show that many state-of-the-art odometry and localization algorithms overfit to simple driving environments and degrade significantly on the more challenging Boreas-RT routes. Boreas-RT provides a unified dataset for evaluating multi-modal algorithms across diverse road conditions. The dataset, leaderboard, and development kit are available at www.boreas.utias.utoronto.ca.

The pursuit of autonomous driving has produced one of the richest sensor data collections in all of robotics. However, its scale and diversity remain largely untapped. Each dataset adopts different 2D and 3D modalities, such as cameras, lidar, ego states, annotations, traffic lights, and HD maps, with different rates and synchronization schemes. They come in fragmented formats requiring complex dependencies that cannot natively coexist in the same development environment. Further, major inconsistencies in annotation conventions prevent training or measuring generalization across multiple datasets. We present 123D, an open-source framework that unifies such multi-modal driving data through a single API. To handle synchronization, we store each modality as an independent timestamped event stream with no prescribed rate, enabling synchronous or asynchronous access across arbitrary datasets. Using 123D, we consolidate eight real-world driving datasets spanning 3,300 hours and 90,000 kilometers, together with a synthetic dataset with configurable collection scripts, and provide tools for data analysis and visualization. We conduct a systematic study comparing annotation statistics and assessing each dataset's pose and calibration accuracy. Further, we showcase two applications 123D enables: cross-dataset 3D object detection transfer and reinforcement learning for planning, and offer recommendations for future directions. Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/kesai-labs/py123d.

Autonomous driving must operate across diverse surfaces to enable safe mobility. However, most driving datasets are captured on well-paved flat roads. Moreover, recent driving datasets primarily provide sparse LiDAR ground truth for images, which is insufficient for assessing fine-grained geometry in depth estimation and completion. To address these gaps, we introduce CARD, a multi-modal driving dataset that delivers quasi-dense 3D ground truth across continuous sequences rich in speed bumps, potholes, irregular surfaces and off-road segments. Our sensor suite includes synchronized global-shutter stereo cameras, front and rear LiDARs, 6-DoF poses from LiDAR-inertial odometry, per-wheel motion traces, and full calibration. Notably, our multi-LiDAR fusion yields ~500K valid depth pixels per frame, about 6.5x more than KITTI Depth Completion and 10x more on average than other public driving datasets. The dataset spans ~110 km and 4.7 hours across Germany and Italy. In addition, CARD provides 2D bounding boxes targeting road-topography irregularities, enabling accurate benchmarking for both geometry and perception tasks. Furthermore, we establish a standardized evaluation protocol for road surface irregularities on CARD and benchmark state-of-the-art depth estimation models to provide strong baselines. The CARD dataset is hosted on https://huggingface.co/CARD-Data.