Learning to Roam Free from Small-Space Autonomous Driving with A Path Planner
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Sascha Hornauer, Karl Zipser, Stella X. Yu
备注：
Changes to previous version: Added further evaluations. Added tests in different environment. Added depth-input validation. Dropped multi-task learning aspect. Currently under review for publication at the ECCV 2018
Modern autonomous driving algorithms often rely on learning the mapping from visual inputs to steering actions from human driving data in a variety of scenarios and visual scenes. The required data collection is not only labor intensive, but such data are often noisy, inconsistent, and inflexible, as there is no differentiation between good and bad drivers, or between different driving intentions. We propose a new autonomous driving approach that learns roaming skills from an optimal path planner. Our model car practices reaching random target locations in a small room with obstacles, by following the optimal trajectory and executing the steering actions decided by a planner. We learn the associations of driving behaviours with depth images, instead of raw color images of the visual scene. This more universal spatial representation allows the learned driving skills to transfer immediately to novel environments with different visual appearances. Our model car trained in a simple room, void of many visual features, demonstrates surprisingly good driving performance in a cluttered office environment, avoiding collisions with novel obstacles and unseen layouts of drive-able space. Its performance on outdoor curbside driving is also on par with human driving.
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
This paper presents a trajectory planner for autonomous driving based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) algorithm that accounts for Pacejka's nonlinear lateral tyre dynamics as well as for zero speed conditions through a novel slip angles calculation. In the NMPC framework, road boundaries and obstacles (both static and moving) are taken into account thanks to soft and hard constraints implementation. The numerical solution of the NMPC problem is carried out using ACADO toolkit coupled with the quadratic programming solver qpOASES. The effectiveness of the proposed NMPC trajectory…
This paper presents an optimization-based collision avoidance trajectory generation method for autonomous driving in free-space environments, with enhanced robustness, driving comfort and efficiency. Starting from the hybrid optimization-based framework, we introduces two warm start methods, temporal and dual variable warm starts, to improve the efficiency. We also reformulate the problem to improve the robustness and efficiency. We name this new algorithm TDR-OBCA. With these changes, compared with original hybrid optimization we achieve a 96.67% failure rate decrease with respect to initial …
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
In this paper, we perform safety and performance analysis of an autonomous vehicle that implements reactive planner and controller for navigating a race lap. Unlike traditional planning algorithms that have access to a map of the environment, reactive planner generates the plan purely based on the current input from sensors. Our reactive planner selects a waypoint on the local Voronoi diagram and we use a pure-pursuit controller to navigate towards the waypoint. Our safety and performance analysis has two parts. The first part demonstrates that the reactive planner computes a plan that is loca…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
We present a novel approach for risk-aware planning with human agents in multi-agent traffic scenarios. Our approach takes into account the wide range of human driver behaviors on the road, from aggressive maneuvers like speeding and overtaking, to conservative traits like driving slowly and conforming to the right-most lane. In our approach, we learn a mapping from a data-driven human driver behavior model called the CMetric to a driver's entropic risk preference. We then use the derived risk preference within a game-theoretic risk-sensitive planner to model risk-aware interactions among huma…
Uber Advanced Technologies Group（优步先进技术集团）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；GraphCore；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The motion planners used in self-driving vehicles need to generate trajectories that are safe, comfortable, and obey the traffic rules. This is usually achieved by two modules: behavior planner, which handles high-level decisions and produces a coarse trajectory, and trajectory planner that generates a smooth, feasible trajectory for the duration of the planning horizon. These planners, however, are typically developed separately, and changes in the behavior planner might affect the trajectory planner in unexpected ways. Furthermore, the final trajectory outputted by the trajectory planner mig…
Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research（荷兰应用科学研究组织）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
The urban environment is amongst the most difficult domains for autonomous vehicles. The vehicle must be able to plan a safe route on challenging road layouts, in the presence of various dynamic traffic participants such as vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians and in various environmental conditions. The challenge remains to have motion planners that are computationally fast and that account for future movements of other road users proactively. This paper describes an computationally efficient sampling-based trajectory planner for safe and comfortable driving in urban environments. The planner i…
Many autonomous driving motion planners generate trajectories by optimizing a reward/cost functional. Designing and tuning a high-performance reward/cost functional for Level-4 autonomous driving vehicles with exposure to different driving conditions is challenging. Traditionally, reward/cost functional tuning involves substantial human effort and time spent on both simulations and road tests. As the scenario becomes more complicated, tuning to improve the motion planner performance becomes increasingly difficult. To systematically solve this issue, we develop a data-driven auto-tuning framewo…
This paper proposes an SVM Enhanced Trajectory Planner for dynamic scenes, typically those encountered in on road settings. Frenet frame based trajectory generation is popular in the context of autonomous driving both in research and industry. We incorporate a safety based maximal margin criteria using a SVM layer that generates control points that are maximally separated from all dynamic obstacles in the scene. A kinematically consistent trajectory generator then computes a path through these waypoints. We showcase through simulations as well as real world experiments on a self driving car th…
Diffusion Forcing Planner: History-Annealed Planning with Time-Dependent Guidance for Autonomous Driving
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd（银网智能科技有限公司）；Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院）
Volkswagen AG（大众汽车公司）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Behavior and motion planning play an important role in automated driving. Traditionally, behavior planners instruct local motion planners with predefined behaviors. Due to the high scene complexity in urban environments, unpredictable situations may occur in which behavior planners fail to match predefined behavior templates. Recently, general-purpose planners have been introduced, combining behavior and local motion planning. These general-purpose planners allow behavior-aware motion planning given a single reward function. However, two challenges arise: First, this function has to map a comp…
Rethinking Imitation-based Planner for Autonomous Driving
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Lotus Technology Ltd.（路特斯科技有限公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Efficient and Safe Planner for Automated Driving on Ramps Considering Unsatisfication
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学计算机科学系）；James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学詹姆斯·瓦特工程学院）；School of Engineering, Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学工程学院）；School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学计算机科学学院）
Autonomous vehicle's technology is expected to be disruptive for automotive industry in next years. This paper proposes a novel real-time trajectory planner based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) algorithm. A nonlinear single track vehicle model with Pacejka's lateral tyre formulas has been implemented. The numerical solution of the NMPC problem is obtained by means of the implementation of a novel genetic algorithm strategy. Numerical results are discussed through simulations that shown a reasonable behavior of the proposed strategy in presence of static or moving obstacles as w…
Real-time planning under uncertainty is critical for robots operating in complex dynamic environments. Consider, for example, an autonomous robot vehicle driving in dense, unregulated urban traffic of cars, motorcycles, buses, etc. The robot vehicle has to plan in both short and long terms, in order to interact with many traffic participants with uncertain intentions and drive effectively. Planning explicitly over a long time horizon, however, incurs prohibitive computational costs and is impractical under real-time constraints. To achieve real-time performance for large-scale planning, this w…
PrismAD: Decoupled Planning via Semantic Mixture-of-Planners for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与运载学院）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学智能绿色车辆与出行国家重点实验室）；School of Cyberspace Security, Southeast University（东南大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Automotive Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学汽车工程学院）；SAIC GM Wuling Automobile Co., Ltd.（上汽通用五菱汽车股份有限公司）
Learning Online Belief Prediction for Efficient POMDP Planning in Autonomous Driving
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学机械与航空航天工程学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
FiveAI Ltd（FiveAI有限公司）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Recent road trials have shown that guaranteeing the safety of driving decisions is essential for the wider adoption of autonomous vehicle technology. One promising direction is to pose safety requirements as planning constraints in nonlinear, non-convex optimization problems of motion synthesis. However, many implementations of this approach are limited by uncertain convergence and local optimality of the solutions achieved, affecting overall robustness. To improve upon these issues, we propose a novel two-stage optimization framework: in the first stage, we find a solution to a Mixed-Integer …
TrafficSignBench: Rule-Centric Closed-Loop Evaluation of Traffic-Sign Compliance in Autonomous Driving
Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；FusionBrain Lab（FusionBrain实验室）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；HSE University（高等经济大学）；Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学）；NUST MISIS（国立研究型技术大学莫斯科国立钢铁合金学院）
Beyond Self-Play and Scale: A Behavior Benchmark for Generalization in Autonomous Driving
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Coburg University of Applied Sciences（科堡应用科学大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Motion planning is a fundamental component in automated vehicles. It influences the comfort and time efficiency of the ride. Despite a vast collection of studies working towards improving motion comfort in self-driving cars, little attention has been paid to the performance of human drivers as a baseline. In this paper, we present an experimental study conducted on a public road using an instrumented vehicle to investigate how human drivers balance comfort and time efficiency. The human driving data is compared with two optimization-based motion planners that we developed in the past. In situa…
PlannerRFT: Reinforcing Diffusion Planners through Closed-Loop and Sample-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Tongji University（同济大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；OpenDriveLab at The University of Hong Kong（香港大学OpenDrive实验室）；Meituan（美团）；Li Auto Inc.（李自动公司）
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
We present a novel hybrid learning method, HyLEAR, for solving the collision-free navigation problem for self-driving cars in POMDPs. HyLEAR leverages interposed learning to embed knowledge of a hybrid planner into a deep reinforcement learner to faster determine safe and comfortable driving policies. In particular, the hybrid planner combines pedestrian path prediction and risk-aware path planning with driving-behavior rule-based reasoning such that the driving policies also take into account, whenever possible, the ride comfort and a given set of driving-behavior rules. Our experimental perf…
PlannerForge: LLM Agents for Scenario-Based Testing of Motion Planners in Autonomous Driving
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；TUM School of Engineering and Design（慕尼黑工业大学工程与设计学院）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
RAPiD: Reward-Guided Consistency Distillation of Diffusion Planners for Real-Time Autonomous Driving
School of Information Technology, Monash University, Malaysia（墨尔本大学信息科技学院）；Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia（墨尔本大学信息技术学院）；TCS Research, India（印度TCS研究）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Evaluating and improving planning for autonomous vehicles requires scalable generation of long-tail traffic scenarios. To be useful, these scenarios must be realistic and challenging, but not impossible to drive through safely. In this work, we introduce STRIVE, a method to automatically generate challenging scenarios that cause a given planner to produce undesirable behavior, like collisions. To maintain scenario plausibility, the key idea is to leverage a learned model of traffic motion in the form of a graph-based conditional VAE. Scenario generation is formulated as an optimization in the …
PLAN-S: Bridging Planning with Latent Style Dynamics for Autonomous Driving World Models
Intelligent Transportation Thrust, Systems Hub, and Center of Seamless Connectivity & Connected Intelligence, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（智能交通 thrust、系统中心及无缝连接与智能连接研究院，香港科学与技术大学（广州））
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Waytous Inc.（Waytous公司）；Autonomous Driving Lab, Tencent（腾讯自动驾驶实验室）；Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系清华大学信息科学与技术国家实验室）
Left-turn planning is one of the formidable challenges for autonomous vehicles, especially at unsignalized intersections due to the unknown intentions of oncoming vehicles. This paper addresses the challenge by proposing a critical turning point (CTP) based hierarchical planning approach. This includes a high-level candidate path generator and a low-level partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) based planner. The proposed (CTP) concept, inspired by human-driving behaviors at intersections, aims to increase the computational efficiency of the low-level planner and to enable human-f…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；UK Atomic Energy Authority（英国原子能管理局）
Driving energy consumption plays a major role in the navigation of mobile robots in challenging environments, especially if they are left to operate unattended under limited on-board power. This paper reports on first results of an energy-aware path planner, which can provide estimates of the driving energy consumption and energy recovery of a robot traversing complex uneven terrains. Energy is estimated over trajectories making use of a self-supervised learning approach, in which the robot autonomously learns how to correlate perceived terrain point clouds to energy consumption and recovery. …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Interactive traffic simulation is crucial to autonomous driving systems by enabling testing for planners in a more scalable and safe way compared to real-world road testing. Existing approaches learn an agent model from large-scale driving data to simulate realistic traffic scenarios, yet it remains an open question to produce consistent and diverse multi-agent interactive behaviors in crowded scenes. In this work, we present InterSim, an interactive traffic simulator for testing autonomous driving planners. Given a test plan trajectory from the ego agent, InterSim reasons about the interactio…
