Accurate Mapping and Planning for Autonomous Racing
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）
Leiv Andresen, Adrian Brandemuehl, Alex Hönger, Benson Kuan, Niclas Vödisch, Hermann Blum, Victor Reijgwart, Lukas Bernreiter, Lukas Schaupp, Jen Jen Chung, Mat… 展开作者
Leiv Andresen, Adrian Brandemuehl, Alex Hönger, Benson Kuan, Niclas Vödisch, Hermann Blum, Victor Reijgwart, Lukas Bernreiter, Lukas Schaupp, Jen Jen Chung, Mathias Bürki, Martin R. Oswald, Roland Siegwart, Abel Gawel
发表信息：
2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020, pp. 4743-4749
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 when driving at the same speeds. Furthermore, the new pipeline makes it possible to reliably raise the maximum driving speed in unknown environments from 3~m/s to 12~m/s while still mapping with an acceptable RMSE of 0.29~m.
This paper presents an adaptive lookahead pure-pursuit lateral controller for optimizing racing metrics such as lap time, average lap speed, and deviation from a reference trajectory in an autonomous racing scenario. We propose a greedy algorithm to compute and assign optimal lookahead distances for the pure-pursuit controller for each waypoint on a reference trajectory for improving the race metrics. We use a ROS based autonomous racing simulator to evaluate the adaptive pure-pursuit algorithm and compare our method with several other pure-pursuit based lateral controllers. We also demonstrat…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；DJI（大疆）
With the autonomy of aerial robots advances in recent years, autonomous drone racing has drawn increasing attention. In a professional pilot competition, a skilled operator always controls the drone to agilely avoid obstacles in aggressive attitudes, for reaching the destination as fast as possible. Autonomous flight like elite pilots requires planning in SE(3), whose non-triviality and complexity hindering a convincing solution in our community by now. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes an open-source baseline, which includes a high-performance SE(3) planner and a challenging simulation …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Twentieth Century Fox（二十世纪福克斯）；Starfleet Academy（星际舰队学院）；Tyrell Inc.（泰瑞尔公司）
A fundamental aspect of racing is overtaking other race cars. Whereas previous research on autonomous racing has majorly focused on lap-time optimization, here, we propose a method to plan overtaking maneuvers in autonomous racing. A Gaussian process is used to learn the behavior of the leading vehicle. Based on the outputs of the Gaussian process, a stochastic Model Predictive Control algorithm plans optimistic trajectories, such that the controlled autonomous race car is able to overtake the leading vehicle. The proposed method is tested in a simple simulation scenario.
Safe autonomous vehicles must be able to predict and react to the drivers around them. Previous control methods rely heavily on pre-computation and are unable to react to dynamic events as they unfold in real-time. In this paper, we extend Model Predictive Path Integral Control (MPPI) using differential game theory and introduce Best-Response MPPI (BR-MPPI) for real-time multi-vehicle interactions. Experimental results are presented using two AutoRally platforms in a racing format with BR-MPPI competing against a skilled human driver at the Georgia Tech Autonomous Racing Facility.
Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a strategy for autonomous drone racing which is computationally more efficient than navigation methods like visual inertial odometry and simultaneous localization and mapping. This fast light-weight vision-based navigation algorithm estimates the position of the drone by fusing race gate detections with model dynamics predictions. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show t…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；IUPUI（印第安纳大学-普渡大学印第安纳波利斯联合分校）
The paper presents a strategy for the control of anautonomous racing car on a pre-mapped track. Using a dynamic model of the vehicle, the optimal racing line is computed, taking track boundaries into account. With the optimal racing line as areference, a local nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) is proposed, which takes into account multiple local objectives like making more progress along the race line, avoiding collision with opponent vehicles, and use of drafting to achieve more progress.
Event-based vision has already revolutionized the perception task for robots by promising faster response, lower energy consumption, and lower bandwidth without introducing motion blur. In this work, a novel deep learning method based on gated recurrent units utilizing sparse convolutions for detecting gates in a race track is proposed using event-based vision for the autonomous drone racing problem. We demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the perception pipeline on a real robot platform that can safely navigate a typical autonomous drone racing track in real-time. Throughout the experim…
Expert Knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Racing via Trajectory Guidance and Dynamics Constraints
College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学汽车与能源工程学院）；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）
SPARK: Low Latency Single-Camera 3D Pose Estimation for Autonomous Racing using Keypoints
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；School of Engineering & Design, Department of Mobility Systems Engineering, Institute of Automotive Technology（工程与设计学院，移动系统工程系，汽车技术研究所）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
Head-to-Head autonomous racing at the limits of handling in the A2RL challenge
Institute of Automotive Technology, TUM（汽车技术研究所，慕尼黑技术大学）；Chair of Automatic Control, TUM（自动控制教授座，慕尼黑技术大学）；Professorship Autonomous Vehicle Systems, TUM（自主车辆系统教授职位，慕尼黑技术大学）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Autonomous drone racing is becoming an excellent platform to challenge quadrotors' autonomy techniques including planning, navigation and control technologies. However, most research on this topic mainly focuses on single drone scenarios. In this paper, we describe a novel time-optimal trajectory generation method for generating time-optimal trajectories for a swarm of quadrotors to fly through pre-defined waypoints with their maximum maneuverability without collision. We verify the method in the Gazebo simulations where a swarm of 5 quadrotors can fly through a complex 6-waypoint racing track…
RaceMOP: Mapless Online Path Planning for Multi-Agent Autonomous Racing using Residual Policy Learning
TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学工程与设计学院）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学信息科学与技术研究生院）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Resolving edge-cases in autonomous driving, head-to-head autonomous racing is getting a lot of attention from the industry and academia. In this study, we propose a game-theoretic model predictive control (MPC) approach for head-to-head autonomous racing and data-driven model identification method. For the practical estimation of nonlinear model parameters, we adopted the hyperband algorithm, which is used for neural model training in machine learning. The proposed controller comprises three modules: 1) game-based opponents' trajectory predictor, 2) high-level race strategy planner, and 3) MPC…
End2Race: An End-to-End Learning Framework for Multi-Vehicle Autonomous Racing
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan（土木与环境工程系，密歇根大学）；University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute（密歇根大学交通研究所）
Online Velocity Profile Generation and Tracking for Sampling-Based Local Planning Algorithms in Autonomous Racing Environments
Professorship of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich（自主车辆系统教授职位，技术大学慕尼黑工程与设计学院，技术大学慕尼黑）；Chair of Automatic Control, Technical University of Munich（自动控制教授职位，技术大学慕尼黑）；Institute of Automotive Technology, TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich（汽车技术研究所，技术大学慕尼黑工程与设计学院，技术大学慕尼黑）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所（MIRMI））
Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network-based perception method for racing gate detection -- PencilNet -- which relies on a lightweight neural network backbone on top of a pencil filter. This approach unifies predictions of the gates' 2D position, distance, and orientation in a single pose tuple. We show that our method is effective for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer learning that does not need an…
IIT Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）
Delays endanger safety of autonomous systems operating in a rapidly changing environment, such as nondeterministic surrounding traffic participants in autonomous driving and high-speed racing. Unfortunately, delays are typically not considered during the conventional controller design or learning-enabled controller training phases prior to deployment in the physical world. In this paper, the computation delay from nonlinear optimization for motion planning and control, as well as other unavoidable delays caused by actuators, are addressed systematically and unifiedly. To deal with all these de…
Robust Spatiotemporal Motion Planning for Multi-Agent Autonomous Racing via Topological Gap Identification and Accelerated MPC
Department of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Center for Project-Based Learning, D-ITET, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院项目导向学习中心）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）
Autonomous car racing is a challenging task, as it requires precise applications of control while the vehicle is operating at cornering speeds. Traditional autonomous pipelines require accurate pre-mapping, localization, and planning which make the task computationally expensive and environment-dependent. Recent works propose use of imitation and reinforcement learning to train end-to-end deep neural networks and have shown promising results for high-speed racing. However, the end-to-end models may be dangerous to be deployed on real systems, as the neural networks are treated as black-box mod…
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
High-performance autonomy often must operate at the boundaries of safety. When external agents are present in a system, the process of ensuring safety without sacrificing performance becomes extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an approach to stress test such systems based on the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm. We propose to find faults in such systems through adversarial agent perturbations, where the behaviors of other agents in an otherwise fixed scenario are modified. This creates a large search space of possibilities, which we explore both randomly and with a focu…
Formula Student Driverless challenges engineering students to develop autonomous single-seater race cars in a quest to bring about more graduates who are well-prepared to solve the real world problems associated with autonomous driving. In this paper, we present the software stack of KA-RaceIng's entry to the 2019 competitions. We cover the essential modules of the system, including perception, localization, mapping, motion planning, and control. Furthermore, development methods are outlined and an overview of the system architecture is given. We conclude by presenting selected runtime measure…
The challenges presented in an autonomous racing situation are distinct from those faced in regular autonomous driving and require faster end-to-end algorithms and consideration of a longer horizon in determining optimal current actions keeping in mind upcoming maneuvers and situations. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method for autonomous racing that takes in as inputs video information from an onboard camera and determines final steering and throttle control actions. We use the following split to construct such a method (1) learning a low dimensional representation of the scene, (2) …
Accelerating Autonomy: Insights from Pro Racers in the Era of Autonomous Racing - An Expert Interview Study
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）
Inertial odometry is an attractive solution to the problem of state estimation for agile quadrotor flight. It is inexpensive, lightweight, and it is not affected by perceptual degradation. However, only relying on the integration of the inertial measurements for state estimation is infeasible. The errors and time-varying biases present in such measurements cause the accumulation of large drift in the pose estimates. Recently, inertial odometry has made significant progress in estimating the motion of pedestrians. State-of-the-art algorithms rely on learning a motion prior that is typical of hu…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）
Autonomous racing is a challenging problem, as the vehicle needs to operate at the friction or handling limits in order to achieve minimum lap times. Autonomous race cars require highly accurate perception, state estimation, planning and precise application of controls. What makes it even more challenging is the accurate identification of vehicle model parameters that dictate the effects of the lateral tire slip, which may change over time, for example, due to wear and tear of the tires. Current works either propose model identification offline or need good parameters to start with (within 15-…
University of Sannio（萨尼奥大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
A Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) strategy aimed at controlling a small-scale car model for autonomous racing competitions is presented in this paper. The proposed control strategy is concerned with minimizing the lap time while keeping the vehicle within track boundaries. The optimization problem considers both the vehicle's actuation limits and the lateral and longitudinal forces acting on the car modeled through the Pacejka's magic formula and a simple drivetrain model. Furthermore, the approach allows to safely race on a track populated by static obstacles generating collision-fr…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
To be successful in multi-player drone racing, a player must not only follow the race track in an optimal way, but also compete with other drones through strategic blocking, faking, and opportunistic passing while avoiding collisions. Since unveiling one's own strategy to the adversaries is not desirable, this requires each player to independently predict the other players' future actions. Nash equilibria are a powerful tool to model this and similar multi-agent coordination problems in which the absence of communication impedes full coordination between the agents. In this paper, we propose a…
This paper presents the algorithms and system architecture of an autonomous racecar. The introduced vehicle is powered by a software stack designed for robustness, reliability, and extensibility. In order to autonomously race around a previously unknown track, the proposed solution combines state of the art techniques from different fields of robotics. Specifically, perception, estimation, and control are incorporated into one high-performance autonomous racecar. This complex robotic system, developed by AMZ Driverless and ETH Zurich, finished 1st overall at each competition we attended: Formu…
