Understanding and modeling human driver behavior is crucial for advanced vehicle development. However, unique driving styles, inconsistent behavior, and complex decision processes render it a challenging task, and existing approaches often lack variability or robustness. To approach this problem, we propose Probabilistic Modeling of Driver behavior (ProMoD), a modular framework which splits the task of driver behavior modeling into multiple modules. A global target trajectory distribution is learned with Probabilistic Movement Primitives, clothoids are utilized for local path generation, and the corresponding choice of actions is performed by a neural network. Experiments in a simulated car racing setting show considerable advantages in imitation accuracy and robustness compared to other imitation learning algorithms. The modular architecture of the proposed framework facilitates straightforward extensibility in driving line adaptation and sequencing of multiple movement primitives for future research.
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG（保时捷股份公司）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Engineering a high-performance race car requires a direct consideration of the human driver using real-world tests or Human-Driver-in-the-Loop simulations. Apart from that, offline simulations with human-like race driver models could make this vehicle development process more effective and efficient but are hard to obtain due to various challenges. With this work, we intend to provide a better understanding of race driver behavior and introduce an adaptive human race driver model based on imitation learning. Using existing findings and an interview with a professional race engineer, we identif…
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Autonomous driving systems have a pipeline of perception, decision, planning, and control. The decision module processes information from the perception module and directs the execution of downstream planning and control modules. On the other hand, the recent success of deep learning suggests that this pipeline could be replaced by end-to-end neural control policies, however, safety cannot be well guaranteed for the data-driven neural networks. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework to learn neural decisions in the classical modular pipeline through end-to-end imitation learning. This hyb…
Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zürich（计算机视觉实验室，苏黎世联邦理工学院）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）；PSI, KU Leuven（PSI，鲁汶大学）
End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving commonly rely on expert demonstrations. Although humans are good drivers, they are not good coaches for end-to-end algorithms that demand dense on-policy supervision. On the contrary, automated experts that leverage privileged information can efficiently generate large scale on-policy and off-policy demonstrations. However, existing automated experts for urban driving make heavy use of hand-crafted rules and perform suboptimally even on driving simulators, where ground-truth information is available. To address these issues, we train a reinforcement …
The way to full autonomy of public road vehicles requires the step-by-step replacement of the human driver, with the ultimate goal of replacing the driver completely. Eventually, the driving software has to be able to handle all situations that occur on its own, even emergency situations. These particular situations require extreme combined braking and steering actions at the limits of handling to avoid an accident or to diminish its consequences. An average human driver is not trained to handle such extreme and rarely occurring situations and therefore often fails to do so. However, professio…
One way to approach end-to-end autonomous driving is to learn a policy function that maps from a sensory input, such as an image frame from a front-facing camera, to a driving action, by imitating an expert driver, or a reference policy. This can be done by supervised learning, where a policy function is tuned to minimize the difference between the predicted and ground-truth actions. A policy function trained in this way however is known to suffer from unexpected behaviours due to the mismatch between the states reachable by the reference policy and trained policy functions. More advanced algo…
Biasing the Driving Style of an Artificial Race Driver for Online Time-Optimal Maneuver Planning
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento（工业工程系，特伦托大学）；Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Politecnico di Bari（电气与信息工程系，巴里理工学院）；Professorship of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, Technical University of Munich（自主车辆系统教授职位，慕尼黑技术大学）
Autonomous driving is a complex task, which has been tackled since the first self-driving car ALVINN in 1989, with a supervised learning approach, or behavioral cloning (BC). In BC, a neural network is trained with state-action pairs that constitute the training set made by an expert, i.e., a human driver. However, this type of imitation learning does not take into account the temporal dependencies that might exist between actions taken in different moments of a navigation trajectory. These type of tasks are better handled by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which need to define a rewar…
We present a learning-based planner that aims to robustly drive a vehicle by mimicking human drivers' driving behavior. We leverage a mid-to-mid approach that allows us to manipulate the input to our imitation learning network freely. With that in mind, we propose a novel feedback synthesizer for data augmentation. It allows our agent to gain more driving experience in various previously unseen environments that are likely to encounter, thus improving overall performance. This is in contrast to prior works that rely purely on random synthesizers. Furthermore, rather than completely commit to i…
Two current methods used to train autonomous cars are reinforcement learning and imitation learning. This research develops a new learning methodology and systematic approach in both a simulated and a smaller real world environment by integrating supervised imitation learning into reinforcement learning to make the RL training data collection process more effective and efficient. By combining the two methods, the proposed research successfully leverages the advantages of both RL and IL methods. First, a real mini-scale robot car was assembled and trained on a 6 feet by 9 feet real world track …
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；KA-RaceIng e.V.（KA-RaceIng赛车协会）
This report describes our approach to design and evaluate a software stack for a race car capable of achieving competitive driving performance in the different disciplines of the Formula Student Driverless. By using a 360° LiDAR and optionally three cameras, we reliably recognize the plastic cones that mark the track boundaries at distances of around 35 m, enabling us to drive at the physical limits of the car. Using a GraphSLAM algorithm, we are able to map these cones with a root-mean-square error of less than 15 cm while driving at speeds of over 70 kph on a narrow track. The high-precision…
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院自主系统实验室）；Sevensense Robotics AG（Sevensense机器人公司）；Computer Vision and Geometry Group, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉与几何组）
This paper presents the perception, mapping, and planning pipeline implemented on an autonomous race car. It was developed by the 2019 AMZ driverless team for the Formula Student Germany (FSG) 2019 driverless competition, where it won 1st place overall. The presented solution combines early fusion of camera and LiDAR data, a layered mapping approach, and a planning approach that uses Bayesian filtering to achieve high-speed driving on unknown race tracks while creating accurate maps. We benchmark the method against our team's previous solution, which won FSG 2018, and show improved accuracy wh…
Autonomous cars can perform poorly for many reasons. They may have perception issues, incorrect dynamics models, be unaware of obscure rules of human traffic systems, or follow certain rules too conservatively. Regardless of the exact failure mode of the car, often human drivers around the car are behaving correctly. For example, even if the car does not know that it should pull over when an ambulance races by, other humans on the road will know and will pull over. We propose to make socially cohesive cars that leverage the behavior of nearby human drivers to act in ways that are safer and mor…
Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Autonomous driving is a multi-task problem requiring a deep understanding of the visual environment. End-to-end autonomous systems have attracted increasing interest as a method of learning to drive without exhaustively programming behaviours for different driving scenarios. When humans drive, they rely on a finely tuned sensory system which enables them to quickly acquire the information they need while filtering unnecessary details. This ability to identify task-specific high-interest regions within an image could be beneficial to autonomous driving agents and machine learning systems in gen…
