This study aims to improve the performance and generalization capability of end-to-end autonomous driving with scene understanding leveraging deep learning and multimodal sensor fusion techniques. The designed end-to-end deep neural network takes as input the visual image and associated depth information in an early fusion level and outputs the pixel-wise semantic segmentation as scene understanding and vehicle control commands concurrently. The end-to-end deep learning-based autonomous driving model is tested in high-fidelity simulated urban driving conditions and compared with the benchmark of CoRL2017 and NoCrash. The testing results show that the proposed approach is of better performance and generalization ability, achieving a 100% success rate in static navigation tasks in both training and unobserved situations, as well as better success rates in other tasks than the prior models. A further ablation study shows that the model with the removal of multimodal sensor fusion or scene understanding pales in the new environment because of the false perception. The results verify that the performance of our model is improved by the synergy of multimodal sensor fusion with scene understanding subtask, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed deep neural network with multimodal sensor fusion.
PerceptIn（PerceptIn公司）；The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
This paper is the first to provide a thorough system design overview along with the fusion methods selection criteria of a real-world cooperative autonomous driving system, named Infrastructure-Augmented Autonomous Driving or IAAD. We present an in-depth introduction of the IAAD hardware and software on both road-side and vehicle-side computing and communication platforms. We extensively characterize the IAAD system in the context of real-world deployment scenarios and observe that the network condition that fluctuates along the road is currently the main technical roadblock for cooperative au…
Multi-modal fusion is a basic task of autonomous driving system perception, which has attracted many scholars' interest in recent years. The current multi-modal fusion methods mainly focus on camera data and LiDAR data, but pay little attention to the kinematic information provided by the bottom sensors of the vehicle, such as acceleration, vehicle speed, angle of rotation. These information are not affected by complex external scenes, so it is more robust and reliable. In this paper, we introduce the existing application fields of vehicle bottom information and the research progress of relate…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）
How should representations from complementary sensors be integrated for autonomous driving? Geometry-based sensor fusion has shown great promise for perception tasks such as object detection and motion forecasting. However, for the actual driving task, the global context of the 3D scene is key, e.g. a change in traffic light state can affect the behavior of a vehicle geometrically distant from that traffic light. Geometry alone may therefore be insufficient for effectively fusing representations in end-to-end driving models. In this work, we demonstrate that imitation learning policies based o…
In this era of active development of autonomous vehicles, it becomes crucial to provide driving systems with the capacity to explain their decisions. In this work, we focus on generating high-level driving explanations as the vehicle drives. We present BEEF, for BEhavior Explanation with Fusion, a deep architecture which explains the behavior of a trajectory prediction model. Supervised by annotations of human driving decisions justifications, BEEF learns to fuse features from multiple levels. Leveraging recent advances in the multi-modal fusion literature, BEEF is carefully designed to model …
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
How should we integrate representations from complementary sensors for autonomous driving? Geometry-based fusion has shown promise for perception (e.g. object detection, motion forecasting). However, in the context of end-to-end driving, we find that imitation learning based on existing sensor fusion methods underperforms in complex driving scenarios with a high density of dynamic agents. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a mechanism to integrate image and LiDAR representations using self-attention. Our approach uses transformer modules at multiple resolutions to fuse perspective view and bird…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. In this work, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from mult…
Honda Research Institute USA（美国本田研究所）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）
Predicting future trajectories of traffic agents in highly interactive environments is an essential and challenging problem for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems. On the basis of the fact that self-driving vehicles are equipped with various types of sensors (e.g., LiDAR scanner, RGB camera, radar, etc.), we propose a Cross-Modal Embedding framework that aims to benefit from the use of multiple input modalities. At training time, our model learns to embed a set of complementary features in a shared latent space by jointly optimizing the objective functions across different types …
Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫光学、电子与精密工程研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Although human action anticipation is a task which is inherently multi-modal, state-of-the-art methods on well known action anticipation datasets leverage this data by applying ensemble methods and averaging scores of unimodal anticipation networks. In this work we introduce transformer based modality fusion techniques, which unify multi-modal data at an early stage. Our Anticipative Feature Fusion Transformer (AFFT) proves to be superior to popular score fusion approaches and presents state-of-the-art results outperforming previous methods on EpicKitchens-100 and EGTEA Gaze+. Our model is eas…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Siemens Corporate Technology（西门子企业技术部）；Technion（以色列理工学院）
Combined visual and force feedback play an essential role in contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. Current methods focus on developing the feedback control around a single modality while underrating the synergy of the sensors. Fusing different sensor modalities is necessary but remains challenging. A key challenge is to achieve an effective multi-modal and generalized control scheme to novel objects with precision. This paper proposes a practical multi-modal sensor fusion mechanism using hierarchical policy learning. To begin with, we use a self-supervised encoder that extracts multi-view v…
Aiming at highly accurate object detection for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), this paper presents a Deep Neural Network based 3D object detection model that leverages a three-stage feature extractor by developing a novel LIDAR-Camera fusion scheme. The proposed feature extractor extracts high-level features from two input sensory modalities and recovers the important features discarded during the convolutional process. The novel fusion scheme effectively fuses features across sensory modalities and convolutional layers to find the best representative global features. The fused featur…
