I Built a Real-Time Perception Stack on CARLA. Here Is What Actually Happened.

I want to tell you about the three weeks I spent making YOLO and ROS 2 talk to each other inside a simulator, and why it was nothing like the tutorials made it look.

This is not a clean architecture post. This is a "here is what broke, here is what I changed, here is what I actually learned" post.

If you are building robotics perception systems, or you are just curious what it looks like to wire YOLOv11, ByteTrack, StrongSORT, CARLA, and ROS 2 into something that runs in real time, this one is for you.

What I was building and why

The goal was a real-time robotic perception system that could: