The ability of autonomous vehicles to maintain an accurate trajectory within their road lane is crucial for safe operation. This requires detecting the road lines and estimating the car relative pose within its lane. Lateral lines are usually retrieved from camera images. Still, most of the works on line detection are limited to image mask retrieval and do not provide a usable representation in world coordinates. What we propose in this paper is a complete perception pipeline based on monocular vision and able to retrieve all the information required by a vehicle lateral control system: road lines equation, centerline, vehicle heading and lateral displacement. We evaluate our system by acquiring data with accurate geometric ground truth. To act as a benchmark for further research, we make this new dataset publicly available at http://airlab.deib.polimi.it/datasets/.
Pedestrian Behavior Interacting with Autonomous Vehicles during Unmarked Midblock Multilane Crossings: Role of Infrastructure Design, AV Operations and Signaling
We consider the problem of maximizing distance to road agents for a self-driving car. To this extent, we employ a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach for the steering tracking control of an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). Specifically, we first present a traditional MPC controller, which is then extended to encode the clearance maximization goal by manipulating its cost function and constraints. We provide insights on the additional information needed to achieve such goal, and how this modifies the structure of the original controller. Furthermore, a connection between commonly used safety metric…
Based on the direct perception paradigm of autonomous driving, we investigate and modify the CNNs (convolutional neural networks) AlexNet and GoogLeNet that map an input image to few perception indicators (heading angle, distances to preceding cars, and distance to road centerline) for estimating driving affordances in highway traffic. We also design a controller with these indicators and the short-range sensor information of TORCS (the open racing car simulator) for driving simulated cars to avoid collisions. We collect a set of images from a TORCS camera in various driving scenarios, train t…
AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
School of Software Engineering, XJTU（软件工程学院，西安交通大学）；Horizon Robotics；Shenzhen Loop Area Institute（深圳河套学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
本文提出一种 cascaded 框架，通过将纵向规划转化为路径条件推理过程，提升自动驾驶的协调性和安全性。方法引入锚点回归设计和规划导向的数据增强策略，实现在 Bench2Drive 上达到 SOTA 性能。
Self-Perception Versus Objective Driving Behavior: Subject Study of Lateral Vehicle Guidance
Institute for Driver Assistance and Connected Mobility, University of Applied Science Kempten（肯普滕应用科学大学驾驶辅助与互联移动研究所）；Department of Automotive Engineering, Technical University Berlin（柏林工业大学汽车工程系）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute（香港科技大学深港协同创新研究院）
With the fast development of autonomous driving technologies, there is an increasing demand for high-definition (HD) maps, which provide reliable and robust prior information about the static part of the traffic environments. As one of the important elements in HD maps, road lane centerline is critical for downstream tasks, such as prediction and planning. Manually annotating centerlines for road lanes in HD maps is labor-intensive, expensive and inefficient, severely restricting the wide applications of autonomous driving systems. Previous work seldom explores the lane centerline detection pr…
LANet: A Lane Boundaries-Aware Approach For Robust Trajectory Prediction
Artificial Intelligence Creative Research Lab, ETRI University of Science（ETRI人工智能创意研究实验室，科学技术大学）；Artificial Intelligence Creative Research Lab, ETRI Daejeon, South Korea（ETRI人工智能创意研究实验室，韩国大田）
ARETE: Attention-based Rasterized Encoding for Topology Estimation using HSV-transformed Crowdsourced Vehicle Fleet Data
Mercedes-Benz AG, Research \& Development, Sindelfingen, Germany Institute for Intelligent Systems, Esslingen University of Applied Sciences, Esslingen, Germany
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 issues an integrated control system of self-driving autonomous vehicles based on the personal driving preference to provide personalized comfortable driving experience to autonomous vehicle users. We propose an Occupant's Preference Metric (OPM) which is defining a preferred lateral and longitudinal acceleration region with maximum allowable jerk for users. Moreover, we propose a vehicle controller based on control parameters enabling integrated lateral and longitudinal control via preference-aware maneuvering of autonomous vehicles. The proposed system not only provides the criteri…
Exploring the Influence of Driving Context on Lateral Driving Style Preferences: A Simulator-Based Study
Technical University Berlin（柏林工业大学）；University of Applied Science Kempten（肯普滕应用科学大学）；Institute for Driver Assistance and Connected Mobility（驾驶员辅助与互联移动研究所）
SD++: Enhancing Standard Definition Maps by Incorporating Road Knowledge using LLMs
Contextual Robotics Institute, University of California San Diego（情境机器人研究所，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Eng., UC San Diego（计算机科学与工程系，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Nissan North America（日产北美）
Autonomous driving has been quite promising in recent years. The public has seen Robotaxi delivered by Waymo, Baidu, Cruise, and so on. While autonomous driving vehicles certainly have a bright future, we have to admit that it is still a long way to go for products such as Robotaxi. On the other hand, in less complex scenarios autonomous driving may have the potentiality to reliably outperform humans. For example, humans are good at interactive tasks (while autonomous driving systems usually do not), but we are often incompetent for tasks with strict precision demands. In this paper, we introd…
National Chiao Tung University（台湾交通大学）；National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）
Inspired by the UNet architecture of semantic image segmentation, we propose a lightweight UNet using depthwise separable convolutions (DSUNet) for end-to-end learning of lane detection and path prediction (PP) in autonomous driving. We also design and integrate a PP algorithm with convolutional neural network (CNN) to form a simulation model (CNN-PP) that can be used to assess CNN's performance qualitatively, quantitatively, and dynamically in a host agent car driving along with other agents all in a real-time autonomous manner. DSUNet is 5.16x lighter in model size and 1.61x faster in infere…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；University of Nevada, Las Vegas（内华达大学拉斯维加斯分校）
In the last decade, research in the field of autonomous vehicles has grown immensely, and there is a wealth of information available for researchers to rapidly establish an autonomous vehicle platform for basic maneuvers. In this paper, we design, implement, and test, in ten weeks, a PD approach to longitudinal control for pedestrian emergency braking. We also propose a lateral controller with a similar design for future testing in lane following. Using widely available tools, we demonstrate the safety of the vehicle in pedestrian emergency braking scenarios.
D$^3$-MoE:Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts for Style-Controllable End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Intelligent Transportation Systems Research Center, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学智能交通系统研究中心）；School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学机械电子工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Distributed System Security, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（湖北省分布式系统安全重点实验室，华中科技大学网络空间安全学院）
Analyzing the Impact of Simulation Fidelity on the Evaluation of Autonomous Driving Motion Control
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；School of Engineering & Design（工程与设计学院）；Department of Mobility Systems Engineering（移动系统工程系）；Institute of Automotive Technology（汽车技术研究所）
This paper introduces the autonomous system of the "Smart Shark II" which won the Formula Student Autonomous China (FSAC) Competition in 2018. In this competition, an autonomous racecar is required to complete autonomously two laps of unknown track. In this paper, the author presents the self-driving software structure of this racecar which ensure high vehicle speed and safety. The key components ensure a stable driving of the racecar, LiDAR-based and Vision-based cone detection provide a redundant perception; the EKF-based localization offers high accuracy and high frequency state estimation;…
Iterative learning control has been successfully used for several decades to improve the performance of control systems that perform a single repeated task. Using information from prior control executions, learning controllers gradually determine open-loop control inputs whose reference tracking performance can exceed that of traditional feedback-feedforward control algorithms. This paper considers iterative learning control for a previously unexplored field: autonomous racing. Racecars are driven multiple laps around the same sequence of turns while operating near the physical limits of tire-…
Curriculum-Based Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous UAV Navigation in Unknown Curved Tubular Conduit
DGA Techniques Navales - Direction Générale de l’Armement（法国国防总局海军技术部）；LIRMM, TETIS, CNRS, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry（蒙彼利埃大学保罗-瓦莱里耶大学）；LIS, CNRS, Université de Toulon（土伦大学）
This study presents the design of a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous mobile robot. The main design goal of our robot is to increase its adaptability and flexibility when moving outdoors. This six-wheeled robot platform was equipped with some sensors, such as a global positioning system (GPS), high definition (HD) webcam, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and rotary encoders. A personal mobile computer and 86Duino ONE microcontroller were used as the algorithm computing platform. In terms of control, the lateral offset and head angle offset of the robot were calculated using a differential GPS…
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…
Tackling Snow-Induced Challenges: Safe Autonomous Lane-Keeping with Robust Reinforcement Learning
Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology（电气工程系，阿米尔卡比尔技术大学）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology（机械工程系，阿米尔卡比尔技术大学）
TaCarla: A comprehensive benchmarking dataset for end-to-end autonomous driving
Tuğrul Gorgülü *†（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；Atakan Dağ †（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；M. Esat Kalfaoğlu ‡（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；Halil İbrahim Kuru †（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；Barış Can Cam †（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；Halil İbrahim Öztürk †（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）；Özsel Kılınç §（土耳其巴伊塞蒂大学）
Global Center for Automotive Performance Simulation（全球汽车性能模拟中心）；Honda Research Institute, USA Inc.（美国本田研究院）；Virginia Tech Transportation Institute（弗吉尼亚理工交通研究所）
Ground Technology Research Institute, Agency for Defense Development（国防发展局地面技术研究所）
Non-holonomic vehicle motion has been studied extensively using physics-based models. Common approaches when using these models interpret the wheel/ground interactions using a linear tire model and thus may not fully capture the nonlinear and complex dynamics under various environments. On the other hand, neural network models have been widely employed in this domain, demonstrating powerful function approximation capabilities. However, these black-box learning strategies completely abandon the existing knowledge of well-known physics. In this paper, we seamlessly combine deep learning with a f…
The development of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) presents an opportunity to save and improve lives. However, achieving SAE Level 5 (full) autonomy will require overcoming many technical challenges. There is a gap in the literature regarding the measurement of safety for self-driving systems. Measuring safety and risk is paramount for the generation of useful simulation scenarios for training and validation of autonomous systems. The limitation of current approaches is the dependence on near-crash data. Although near-miss data can substantially increase scarce available accident data, the definition…
