Self-driving vehicles have expanded dramatically over the last few years. Udacity has release a dataset containing, among other data, a set of images with the steering angle captured during driving. The Udacity challenge aimed to predict steering angle based on only the provided images. We explore two different models to perform high quality prediction of steering angles based on images using different deep learning techniques including Transfer Learning, 3D CNN, LSTM and ResNet. If the Udacity challenge was still ongoing, both of our models would have placed in the top ten of all entries.
In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end deep neural network model for autonomous driving that takes monocular image sequence as input, and directly generates the steering control angle. Firstly, we model the end-to-end driving problem as a local path planning process. Inspired by the environmental representation in the classical planning algorithms(i.e. the beam curvature method), pixel-wise orientations are fed into the network to learn direction-aware features. Next, to handle the imbalanced distribution of steering values in training datasets, we propose an improvement on a cost-sensit…
Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that naturally capture the dynamics of a scene, filtering out redundant information. This paper presents a deep neural network approach that unlocks the potential of event cameras on a challenging motion-estimation task: prediction of a vehicle's steering angle. To make the best out of this sensor-algorithm combination, we adapt state-of-the-art convolutional architectures to the output of event sensors and extensively evaluate the performance of our approach on a publicly available large scale event-camera dataset (~1000 km). We present qualitativ…
Self-driving vehicles are expected to be a massive economic influence over the coming decades. Udacity https://www.udacity.com/ has been working on a completely open-source self driving car. Thus, it regularly organizes various competitions, one of which was dedicated to steering angle prediction task. In this work, we perform an extensive study on this particular task by exploring the Udacity Self-driving Car Challenge 2. We provide insights on the previous teams' solutions. Moreover, we propose our new architecture that is inspired by some of the teams. We report our performance and compare …
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；SAIC USA Innovation Center（上汽美国创新中心）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been successfully applied to autonomous driving tasks, many in an end-to-end manner. Previous end-to-end steering control methods take an image or an image sequence as the input and directly predict the steering angle with CNN. Although single task learning on steering angles has reported good performances, the steering angle alone is not sufficient for vehicle control. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning framework to predict the steering angle and speed control simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. Since it is nontrivial to predict accurat…
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
In this paper, we present a transfer learning method for the end-to-end control of self-driving cars, which enables a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a source domain to be utilized for the same task in a different target domain. A conventional CNN for the end-to-end control is designed to map a single front-facing camera image to a steering command. To enable the transfer learning, we let the CNN produce not only a steering command but also a lane departure level (LDL) by adding a new task module, which takes the output of the last convolutional layer as input. The CNN trained on…
End-to-end learners for autonomous driving are deep neural networks that predict the instantaneous steering angle directly from images of the ahead-lying street. These learners must provide reliable uncertainty estimates for their predictions in order to meet safety requirements and initiate a switch to manual control in areas of high uncertainty. Yet end-to-end learners typically only deliver point predictions, since distributional predictions are associated with large increases in training time or additional computational resources during prediction. To address this shortcoming we investigat…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Memphis（孟菲斯大学）
For safety of autonomous driving, vehicles need to be able to drive under various lighting, weather, and visibility conditions in different environments. These external and environmental factors, along with internal factors associated with sensors, can pose significant challenges to perceptual data processing, hence affecting the decision-making and control of the vehicle. In this work, we address this critical issue by introducing a framework for analyzing robustness of the learning algorithm w.r.t varying quality in the image input for autonomous driving. Using the results of sensitivity ana…
Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation for Left-Hand Driving in Autonomous Steering
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰事故研究与道路安全中心、昆士兰理工大学）；QUT Centre for Robotics and School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰大学机器人中心及电气工程与计算机科学学院、昆士兰理工大学）
Institute of Computer Science & Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）
In recent years, autonomous driving algorithms using low-cost vehicle-mounted cameras have attracted increasing endeavors from both academia and industry. There are multiple fronts to these endeavors, including object detection on roads, 3-D reconstruction etc., but in this work we focus on a vision-based model that directly maps raw input images to steering angles using deep networks. This represents a nascent research topic in computer vision. The technical contributions of this work are three-fold. First, the model is learned and evaluated on real human driving videos that are time-synchron…
A convolutional neural network (CNN) approach is used to implement a level 2 autonomous vehicle by mapping pixels from the camera input to the steering commands. The network automatically learns the maximum variable features from the camera input, hence requires minimal human intervention. Given realistic frames as input, the driving policy trained on the dataset by NVIDIA and Udacity can adapt to real-world driving in a controlled environment. The CNN is tested on the CARLA open-source driving simulator. Details of a beta-testing platform are also presented, which consists of an ultrasonic se…
In this tutorial, we detailed simple controllers for autonomous parking and path following for self-driving cars providing practical methods for curvature computation.
In this paper, we apply the attention mechanism to autonomous driving for steering angle prediction. We propose the first model, applying the recently introduced sparse attention mechanism to visual domain, as well as the aggregated extension for this model. We show the improvement of the proposed method, comparing to no attention as well as to different types of attention.
Purdue University（普渡大学）；United States Military Academy（美国军事学院）
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) which are trained end-to-end have been successfully applied to solve complex problems that we have not been able to solve in past decades. Autonomous driving is one of the most complex problems which is yet to be completely solved and autonomous racing adds more complexity and exciting challenges to this problem. Towards the challenge of applying end-to-end learning to autonomous racing, this paper shows results on two aspects: (1) Analyzing the relationship between the driving data used for training and the maximum speed at which the DNN can be successfully applied…
NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）；New York University（纽约大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
As part of a complete software stack for autonomous driving, NVIDIA has created a neural-network-based system, known as PilotNet, which outputs steering angles given images of the road ahead. PilotNet is trained using road images paired with the steering angles generated by a human driving a data-collection car. It derives the necessary domain knowledge by observing human drivers. This eliminates the need for human engineers to anticipate what is important in an image and foresee all the necessary rules for safe driving. Road tests demonstrated that PilotNet can successfully perform lane keepi…
The University of Texas at Dallas（得克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in many autonomous systems such as autonomous driving. Recently, DNN testing has been intensively studied to automatically generate adversarial examples, which inject small-magnitude perturbations into inputs to test DNNs under extreme situations. While existing testing techniques prove to be effective, they mostly focus on generating digital adversarial perturbations (particularly for autonomous driving), e.g., changing image pixels, which may never happen in physical world. There is a critical missing piece in the literature on autonomous …
Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, National Land Survey of Finland（芬兰国家土地调查局芬兰地理空间研究所（FGI））；Aalto University School of Science（阿尔托大学理学院）
Autonomous driving is challenging in adverse road and weather conditions in which there might not be lane lines, the road might be covered in snow and the visibility might be poor. We extend the previous work on end-to-end learning for autonomous steering to operate in these adverse real-life conditions with multimodal data. We collected 28 hours of driving data in several road and weather conditions and trained convolutional neural networks to predict the car steering wheel angle from front-facing color camera images and lidar range and reflectance data. We compared the CNN model performances…
Machine learning models, which are frequently used in self-driving cars, are trained by matching the captured images of the road and the measured angle of the steering wheel. The angle of the steering wheel is generally fetched from steering angle sensor, which is tightly-coupled to the physical aspects of the vehicle at hand. Therefore, a model-agnostic autonomous car-kit is very difficult to be developed and autonomous vehicles need more training data. The proposed vision based steering angle estimation system argues a new approach which basically matches the images of the road captured by a…
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所）；Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学自动控制与计算机学院）
When driving, people make decisions based on current traffic as well as their desired route. They have a mental map of known routes and are often able to navigate without needing directions. Current self-driving models improve their performances when using additional GPS information. Here we aim to push forward self-driving research and perform route planning even in the absence of GPS. Our system learns to predict in real-time vehicle's current location and future trajectory, as a function of time, on a known map, given only the raw video stream and the intended destination. The GPS signal is…
Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Here we explore the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). Our approach is two-stage. In the first stage, we use a visual attenti…
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 follo…
Efficient and Generalized end-to-end Autonomous Driving System with Latent Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations
Shanghai Qizhi Institute（上海启智研究所）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息学院）；Mogo Auto Intelligence and Telematics Information Technology Co., Ltd（摩戈智能与 telemetry 信息技术有限公司）
For human drivers, having rear and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a more complete view of what is happening around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. We investigate the problem in a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In parti…
Towards Increasing the Robustness of Predictive Steering-Control Autonomous Navigation Systems Against Dash Cam Image Angle Perturbations Due to Pothole Encounters
We introduce Ignition: an end-to-end neural network architecture for training unconstrained self-driving vehicles in simulated environments. The model is a ResNet-18 variant, which is fed in images from the front of a simulated F1 car, and outputs optimal labels for steering, throttle, braking. Importantly, we never explicitly train the model to detect road features like the outline of a track or distance to other cars; instead, we illustrate that these latent features can be automatically encapsulated by the network.
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Artisense（阿蒂森斯公司）
Vision-based learning methods for self-driving cars have primarily used supervised approaches that require a large number of labels for training. However, those labels are usually difficult and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we demonstrate how a model can be trained to control a vehicle's trajectory using camera poses estimated through visual odometry methods in an entirely self-supervised fashion. We propose a scalable framework that leverages trajectory information from several different runs using a camera setup placed at the front of a car. Experimental results on the CARLA simulator …
In the typical autonomous driving stack, planning and control systems represent two of the most crucial components in which data retrieved by sensors and processed by perception algorithms are used to implement a safe and comfortable self-driving behavior. In particular, the planning module predicts the path the autonomous car should follow taking the correct high-level maneuver, while control systems perform a sequence of low-level actions, controlling steering angle, throttle and brake. In this work, we propose a model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning Planner training a neural network that p…
Institute of Neuroinformatics（神经信息学研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Event cameras, such as dynamic vision sensors (DVS), and dynamic and active-pixel vision sensors (DAVIS) can supplement other autonomous driving sensors by providing a concurrent stream of standard active pixel sensor (APS) images and DVS temporal contrast events. The APS stream is a sequence of standard grayscale global-shutter image sensor frames. The DVS events represent brightness changes occurring at a particular moment, with a jitter of about a millisecond under most lighting conditions. They have a dynamic range of >120 dB and effective frame rates >1 kHz at data rates comparable to 30 …
Westview High School（韦斯特维尤高中）；Berkeley DeepDrive Center（伯克利深度驾驶中心）
Autonomous driving requires operation in different behavioral modes ranging from lane following and intersection crossing to turning and stopping. However, most existing deep learning approaches to autonomous driving do not consider the behavioral mode in the training strategy. This paper describes a technique for learning multiple distinct behavioral modes in a single deep neural network through the use of multi-modal multi-task learning. We study the effectiveness of this approach, denoted MultiNet, using self-driving model cars for driving in unstructured environments such as sidewalks and …
Steeringless Drifting: Differential-Torque Control of a Four-Wheel Independently Driven Vehicle
School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学机械工程学院）；School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学机械与航天工程学院）
We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to map raw pixels from a single front-facing camera directly to steering commands. This end-to-end approach proved surprisingly powerful. With minimum training data from humans the system learns to drive in traffic on local roads with or without lane markings and on highways. It also operates in areas with unclear visual guidance such as in parking lots and on unpaved roads. The system automatically learns internal representations of the necessary processing steps such as detecting useful road features with only the human steering angle as the tr…
Hand-crafting generalised decision-making rules for real-world urban autonomous driving is hard. Alternatively, learning behaviour from easy-to-collect human driving demonstrations is appealing. Prior work has studied imitation learning (IL) for autonomous driving with a number of limitations. Examples include only performing lane-following rather than following a user-defined route, only using a single camera view or heavily cropped frames lacking state observability, only lateral (steering) control, but not longitudinal (speed) control and a lack of interaction with traffic. Importantly, the…
Autonomous driving is among the most promising of upcoming traffic safety technologies. Prototypes of autonomous vehicles are already being tested on public streets today. However, while current prototypes prove the feasibility of truly driverless cars, edge cases remain which necessitate falling back on human operators. Teleoperated driving is one solution that would allow a human to remotely control a vehicle via mobile radio networks. Removing in-vehicle drivers would thus allow current autonomous technologies to further progress towards becoming genuinely driverless systems. This paper pro…
Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学计算机科学研究所）
The core task of any autonomous driving system is to transform sensory inputs into driving commands. In end-to-end driving, this is achieved via a neural network, with one or multiple cameras as the most commonly used input and low-level driving command, e.g. steering angle, as output. However, depth-sensing has been shown in simulation to make the end-to-end driving task easier. On a real car, combining depth and visual information can be challenging, due to the difficulty of obtaining good spatial and temporal alignment of the sensors. To alleviate alignment problems, Ouster LiDARs can outpu…
