Drifting is a complicated task for autonomous vehicle control. Most traditional methods in this area are based on motion equations derived by the understanding of vehicle dynamics, which is difficult to be modeled precisely. We propose a robust drift controller without explicit motion equations, which is based on the latest model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm soft actor-critic. The drift control problem is formulated as a trajectory following task, where the errorbased state and reward are designed. After being trained on tracks with different levels of difficulty, our controller is capable of making the vehicle drift through various sharp corners quickly and stably in the unseen map. The proposed controller is further shown to have excellent generalization ability, which can directly handle unseen vehicle types with different physical properties, such as mass, tire friction, etc.
This paper presents a novel model-reference reinforcement learning algorithm for the intelligent tracking control of uncertain autonomous surface vehicles with collision avoidance. The proposed control algorithm combines a conventional control method with reinforcement learning to enhance control accuracy and intelligence. In the proposed control design, a nominal system is considered for the design of a baseline tracking controller using a conventional control approach. The nominal system also defines the desired behaviour of uncertain autonomous surface vehicles in an obstacle-free environme…
Autonomous driving technologies are expected to not only improve mobility and road safety but also bring energy efficiency benefits. In the foreseeable future, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will operate on roads shared with human-driven vehicles. To maintain safety and liveness while simultaneously minimizing energy consumption, the AV planning and decision-making process should account for interactions between the autonomous ego vehicle and surrounding human-driven vehicles. In this chapter, we describe a framework for developing energy-efficient autonomous driving policies on shared roads by exp…
Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems represent a rapidly developing mode of transportation wherein travel requests are dynamically handled by a coordinated fleet of robotic, self-driving vehicles. Given a graph representation of the transportation network - one where, for example, nodes represent areas of the city, and edges the connectivity between them - we argue that the AMoD control problem is naturally cast as a node-wise decision-making problem. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework to control the rebalancing of AMoD systems through graph neural networ…
Complex autonomous driving, such as drifting, requires high-precision and high-frequency pose information to ensure accuracy and safety, which is notably difficult when using only onboard sensors. In this paper, we propose a drift controller with two feedback control loops: sideslip controller that stabilizes the sideslip angle by tuning the front wheel steering angle, and circle controller that maintains a stable trajectory radius and circle center by controlling the wheel rotational speed. We use an extended Kalman filter to estimate the state. A robustified KASA algorithm is further propose…
This paper presents a novel model-reference reinforcement learning control method for uncertain autonomous surface vehicles. The proposed control combines a conventional control method with deep reinforcement learning. With the conventional control, we can ensure the learning-based control law provides closed-loop stability for the overall system, and potentially increase the sample efficiency of the deep reinforcement learning. With the reinforcement learning, we can directly learn a control law to compensate for modeling uncertainties. In the proposed control, a nominal system is employed fo…
The use of neural networks and reinforcement learning has become increasingly popular in autonomous vehicle control. However, the opaqueness of the resulting control policies presents a significant barrier to deploying neural network-based control in autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning based approach to autonomous vehicle longitudinal control, where the rule-based safety cages provide enhanced safety for the vehicle as well as weak supervision to the reinforcement learning agent. By guiding the agent to meaningful states and actions, this weak supervision im…
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）
Korea University（高丽大学）；Mofl Inc.（Mofl公司）；Hallym University（翰林大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Ajou University（亚洲大学）
CCTV-based surveillance using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is considered a key technology for security in smart city environments. This paper creates a case where the UAVs with CCTV-cameras fly over the city area for flexible and reliable surveillance services. UAVs should be deployed to cover a large area while minimize overlapping and shadow areas for a reliable surveillance system. However, the operation of UAVs is subject to high uncertainty, necessitating autonomous recovery systems. This work develops a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning-based management scheme for reliable indus…
Tactical decision making is a critical feature for advanced driving systems, that incorporates several challenges such as complexity of the uncertain environment and reliability of the autonomous system. In this work, we develop a multi-modal architecture that includes the environmental modeling of ego surrounding and train a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent that yields consistent performance in stochastic highway driving scenarios. To this end, we feed the occupancy grid of the ego surrounding into the DRL agent and obtain the high-level sequential commands (i.e. lane change) to send t…
To improve efficiency and reduce failures in autonomous vehicles, research has focused on developing robust and safe learning methods that take into account disturbances in the environment. Existing literature in robust reinforcement learning poses the learning problem as a two player game between the autonomous system and disturbances. This paper examines two different algorithms to solve the game, Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning and Neural Fictitious Self Play, and compares performance on an autonomous driving scenario. We extend the game formulation to a semi-competitive setting a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising way to improve learning performance. In this paper, a comprehensive human guidance-based reinforcement learning framework is established. A novel prioritized experience replay mechanism that adapts to human guidance in the reinforcement learning process is proposed to boost the efficiency and performance of the reinforcement learning algorithm. To relieve t…
Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) Fleets companies are starting pilot projects nationwide. In 2020 in Fairfax Virginia it was announced the first Shared Autonomous Vehicle Fleet pilot project in Virginia. SAVs promise to improve quality of life. However, SAVs will also induce some negative externalities by generating excessive vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which leads to more congestions, energy consumption, and emissions. The excessive VMT are primarily generated via empty relocation process. Reinforcement Learning based algorithms are being researched as a possible solution to solve some of t…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；Oklahoma State University（俄克拉荷马州立大学）
Control theory provides engineers with a multitude of tools to design controllers that manipulate the closed-loop behavior and stability of dynamical systems. These methods rely heavily on insights about the mathematical model governing the physical system. However, in complex systems, such as autonomous underwater vehicles performing the dual objective of path-following and collision avoidance, decision making becomes non-trivial. We propose a solution using state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques, to develop autonomous agents capable of achieving this hybrid objective w…
There have been numerous advances in reinforcement learning, but the typically unconstrained exploration of the learning process prevents the adoption of these methods in many safety critical applications. Recent work in safe reinforcement learning uses idealized models to achieve their guarantees, but these models do not easily accommodate the stochasticity or high-dimensionality of real world systems. We investigate how prediction provides a general and intuitive framework to constraint exploration, and show how it can be used to safely learn intersection handling behaviors on an autonomous …
We present a control approach for autonomous vehicles based on deep reinforcement learning. A neural network agent is trained to map its estimated state to acceleration and steering commands given the objective of reaching a specific target state while considering detected obstacles. Learning is performed using state-of-the-art proximal policy optimization in combination with a simulated environment. Training from scratch takes five to nine hours. The resulting agent is evaluated within simulation and subsequently applied to control a full-size research vehicle. For this, the autonomous explor…
We study how robots can autonomously learn skills that require a combination of navigation and grasping. While reinforcement learning in principle provides for automated robotic skill learning, in practice reinforcement learning in the real world is challenging and often requires extensive instrumentation and supervision. Our aim is to devise a robotic reinforcement learning system for learning navigation and manipulation together, in an autonomous way without human intervention, enabling continual learning under realistic assumptions. Our proposed system, ReLMM, can learn continuously on a re…
We examine the problem of adversarial reinforcement learning for multi-agent domains including a rule-based agent. Rule-based algorithms are required in safety-critical applications for them to work properly in a wide range of situations. Hence, every effort is made to find failure scenarios during the development phase. However, as the software becomes complicated, finding failure cases becomes difficult. Especially in multi-agent domains, such as autonomous driving environments, it is much harder to find useful failure scenarios that help us improve the algorithm. We propose a method for eff…
Multi-User Beamforming with Deep Reinforcement Learning in Sensing-Aided Communication
Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University（电子系统系，奥胡斯大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University（电气与计算机工程系，奥胡斯大学）
Baidu Apollo Autonomous Driving（百度阿波罗自动驾驶）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
We introduce ApolloRL, an open platform for research in reinforcement learning for autonomous driving. The platform provides a complete closed-loop pipeline with training, simulation, and evaluation components. It comes with 300 hours of real-world data in driving scenarios and popular baselines such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agents. We elaborate in this paper on the architecture and the environment defined in the platform. In addition, we discuss the performance of the baseline agents in the ApolloRL environment.
To further improve the learning efficiency and performance of reinforcement learning (RL), in this paper we propose a novel uncertainty-aware model-based RL (UA-MBRL) framework, and then implement and validate it in autonomous driving under various task scenarios. First, an action-conditioned ensemble model with the ability of uncertainty assessment is established as the virtual environment model. Then, a novel uncertainty-aware model-based RL framework is developed based on the adaptive truncation approach, providing virtual interactions between the agent and environment model, and improving …
In this paper, we develop a safe decision-making method for self-driving cars in a multi-lane, single-agent setting. The proposed approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve a high-level policy for safe tactical decision-making. We address two major challenges that arise solely in autonomous navigation. First, the proposed algorithm ensures that collisions never happen, and therefore accelerate the learning process. Second, the proposed algorithm takes into account the unobservable states in the environment. These states appear mainly due to the unpredictable behavior of othe…
Navya（纳维亚）；Valeo（法雷奥）；ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎高等先进技术学院）；AKKA Technologies（AKKA科技公司）；National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学）
With the development of deep representation learning, the domain of reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful learning framework now capable of learning complex policies in high dimensional environments. This review summarises deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and provides a taxonomy of automated driving tasks where (D)RL methods have been employed, while addressing key computational challenges in real world deployment of autonomous driving agents. It also delineates adjacent domains such as behavior cloning, imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning that are relate…
SRM Institute of Science and Technology（SRM科学技术研究所）
In this work, we present a rigorous end-to-end control strategy for autonomous vehicles aimed at minimizing lap times in a time attack racing event. We also introduce AutoRACE Simulator developed as a part of this research project, which was employed to simulate accurate vehicular and environmental dynamics along with realistic audio-visual effects. We adopted a hybrid imitation-reinforcement learning architecture and crafted a novel reward function to train a deep neural network policy to drive (using imitation learning) and race (using reinforcement learning) a car autonomously in less than …
TuSimple Inc.（图森未来公司）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；California PATH（加州先进交通与高速公路合作伙伴项目）
In this survey, we systematically summarize the current literature on studies that apply reinforcement learning (RL) to the motion planning and control of autonomous vehicles. Many existing contributions can be attributed to the pipeline approach, which consists of many hand-crafted modules, each with a functionality selected for the ease of human interpretation. However, this approach does not automatically guarantee maximal performance due to the lack of a system-level optimization. Therefore, this paper also presents a growing trend of work that falls into the end-to-end approach, which typ…
Since deep neural networks' resurgence, reinforcement learning has gradually strengthened and surpassed humans in many conventional games. However, it is not easy to copy these accomplishments to autonomous driving because state spaces are immensely complicated in the real world and action spaces are continuous and fine control is necessary. Besides, autonomous driving systems must also maintain their functionality regardless of the environment's complexity. The deep reinforcement learning domain (DRL) has become a robust learning framework to handle complex policies in high dimensional surrou…
Reinforcement learning using a novel predictive representation is applied to autonomous driving to accomplish the task of driving between lane markings where substantial benefits in performance and generalization are observed on unseen test roads in both simulation and on a real Jackal robot. The novel predictive representation is learned by general value functions (GVFs) to provide out-of-policy, or counter-factual, predictions of future lane centeredness and road angle that form a compact representation of the state of the agent improving learning in both online and offline reinforcement lea…
Evaluation of Safety Constraints in Autonomous Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；AIRI（AIRI（人工智能研究所））；Federal Research Center for Computer Science and Control of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）
Autonomous harvesting may provide a viable solution to mounting labor pressures in the United States's strawberry industry. However, due to bottlenecks in machine perception and economic viability, a profitable and commercially adopted strawberry harvesting system remains elusive. In this research, we explore the feasibility of using deep reinforcement learning to overcome these bottlenecks and develop a practical algorithm to address the sub-objective of viewpoint optimization, or the development of a control policy to direct a camera to favorable vantage points for autonomous harvesting. We …
In this work, we investigate the application of Reinforcement Learning to two well known decision dilemmas, namely Newcomb's Problem and Prisoner's Dilemma. These problems are exemplary for dilemmas that autonomous agents are faced with when interacting with humans. Furthermore, we argue that a Newcomb-like formulation is more adequate in the human-machine interaction case and demonstrate empirically that the unmodified Reinforcement Learning algorithms end up with the well known maximum expected utility solution.
Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to enable autonomous acquisition of complex behaviors for diverse agents. However, the success of current reinforcement learning algorithms is predicated on an often under-emphasised requirement -- each trial needs to start from a fixed initial state distribution. Unfortunately, resetting the environment to its initial state after each trial requires substantial amount of human supervision and extensive instrumentation of the environment which defeats the goal of autonomous acquisition of complex behaviors. In this work, we propose Value-accelerated Persist…
In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) structure which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network is capable of 1) learning one task with multiple sub-goals simultaneously; 2) extracting attentions of states according to changing sub-goals during the learning process; 3) reusing the well-trained network of sub-goals for other similar tasks with the same sub-goals. The states are defined as processed observations which are transmitted from the perception s…
How to explore corner cases as efficiently and thoroughly as possible has long been one of the top concerns in the context of deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL) autonomous driving. Training with simulated data is less costly and dangerous than utilizing real-world data, but the inconsistency of parameter distribution and the incorrect system modeling in simulators always lead to an inevitable Sim2real gap, which probably accounts for the underperformance in novel, anomalous and risky cases that simulators can hardly generate. Domain Randomization(DR) is a methodology that can bridge this gap…
ENSTA ParisTech（巴黎高等科技学院）；AKKA Technologies（阿卡科技公司）；Valeo Egypt（法雷奥埃及公司）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统公司）；Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology（戈尔韦-梅奥理工学院）
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become increasingly powerful in recent years, with notable achievements such as Deepmind's AlphaGo. It has been successfully deployed in commercial vehicles like Mobileye's path planning system. However, a vast majority of work on DRL is focused on toy examples in controlled synthetic car simulator environments such as TORCS and CARLA. In general, DRL is still at its infancy in terms of usability in real-world applications. Our goal in this paper is to encourage real-world deployment of DRL in various autonomous driving (AD) applications. We first provide …
