For autonomous vehicles to safely share the road with human drivers, autonomous vehicles must abide by specific "road rules" that human drivers have agreed to follow. "Road rules" include rules that drivers are required to follow by law -- such as the requirement that vehicles stop at red lights -- as well as more subtle social rules -- such as the implicit designation of fast lanes on the highway. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that -- instead of hard-coding road rules into self-driving algorithms -- a scalable alternative may be to design multi-agent environments in which road rules emerge as optimal solutions to the problem of maximizing traffic flow. We analyze what ingredients in driving environments cause the emergence of these road rules and find that two crucial factors are noisy perception and agents' spatial density. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the emergence of seven social driving behaviors, ranging from obeying traffic signals to following lanes, all of which emerge from training agents to drive quickly to destinations without colliding. Our results add empirical support for the social road rules that countries worldwide have agreed on for safe, efficient driving.
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Recent developments in multi-agent imitation learning have shown promising results for modeling the behavior of human drivers. However, it is challenging to capture emergent traffic behaviors that are observed in real-world datasets. Such behaviors arise due to the many local interactions between agents that are not commonly accounted for in imitation learning. This paper proposes Reward Augmented Imitation Learning (RAIL), which integrates reward augmentation into the multi-agent imitation learning framework and allows the designer to specify prior knowledge in a principled fashion. We prove …
RMMDet: Road-Side Multitype and Multigroup Sensor Detection System for Autonomous Driving
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Xin Dong Interactive Entertainment Company Ltd（鑫东互动娱乐有限公司）；Summer Son Smart Technology Company Ltd（夏之子智能科技有限公司）
Estimating Driver Personality Traits from On-Road Driving Data
Japan Advanced Institute of Science Technology（日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）；Institute of Innovation for Future Society（未来社会创新研究所）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Chukyo University（中京大学）
Autonomous driving is complex, requiring sophisticated 3D scene understanding, localization, mapping, and control. Rather than explicitly modelling and fusing each of these components, we instead consider an end-to-end approach via reinforcement learning (RL). However, collecting exploration driving data in the real world is impractical and dangerous. While training in simulation and deploying visual sim-to-real techniques has worked well for robot manipulation, deploying beyond controlled workspace viewpoints remains a challenge. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting Sim2Seg,…
The majority of current approaches in autonomous driving rely on High-Definition (HD) maps which detail the road geometry and surrounding area. Yet, this reliance is one of the obstacles to mass deployment of autonomous vehicles due to poor scalability of such prior maps. In this paper, we tackle the problem of online road map extraction via leveraging the sensory system aboard the vehicle itself. To this end, we design a structured model where a graph representation of the road network is generated in a hierarchical fashion within a fully convolutional network. The method is able to handle co…
University of South Australia（南澳大利亚大学）；University of Tasmania（塔斯马尼亚大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Autonomous driving has been at the forefront of public interest, and a pivotal debate to widespread concerns is safety in the transportation system. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to autonomous driving to provide solutions for obstacle avoidance. However, in a road traffic junction scenario, the vehicle typically receives partial observations from the transportation environment, while DRL needs to rely on long-term rewards to train a reliable model by maximising the cumulative rewards, which may take the risk when exploring new actions and returning either a positive reward…
Technical University of Crete（克里特理工大学）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）
In this work the problem of path planning for an autonomous vehicle that moves on a freeway is considered. The most common approaches that are used to address this problem are based on optimal control methods, which make assumptions about the model of the environment and the system dynamics. On the contrary, this work proposes the development of a driving policy based on reinforcement learning. In this way, the proposed driving policy makes minimal or no assumptions about the environment, since a priori knowledge about the system dynamics is not required. Driving scenarios where the road is oc…
Predictions of driver's intentions and their behaviors using the road is of great importance for planning and decision making processes of autonomous driving vehicles. In particular, relatively short-term driving intentions are the fundamental units that constitute more sophisticated driving goals, behaviors, such as overtaking the slow vehicle in front, exit or merge onto a high way, etc. While it is not uncommon that most of the time human driver can rationalize, in advance, various on-road behaviors, intentions, as well as the associated risks, aggressiveness, reciprocity characteristics, e…
Learning Autonomy: Off-Road Navigation Enhanced by Human Input
J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University（J. Mike Walker ’66 机械工程系，德克萨斯A&M大学）；Department of Engineering technology and Industrial Distribution, Texas A&M University（工程技术与工业分销系，德克萨斯A&M大学）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
It is essential for an automated vehicle in the field to perform discretionary lane changes with appropriate roadmanship - driving safely and efficiently without annoying or endangering other road users - under a wide range of traffic cultures and driving conditions. While deep reinforcement learning methods have excelled in recent years and been applied to automated vehicle driving policy, there are concerns about their capability to quickly adapt to unseen traffic with new environment dynamics. We formulate this challenge as a multi-Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) adaptation problem and dev…
The task of predicting stochastic behaviors of road agents in diverse environments is a challenging problem for autonomous driving. To best understand scene contexts and produce diverse possible future states of the road agents adaptively in different environments, a prediction model should be probabilistic, multi-modal, context-driven, and general. We present Conditionalizing Variational AutoEncoders via Hypernetworks (CVAE-H); a conditional VAE that extensively leverages hypernetwork and performs generative tasks for high-dimensional problems like the prediction task. We first evaluate CVAE-…
In order to drive safely on the road, autonomous vehicle is expected to predict future outcomes of its surrounding environment and react properly. In fact, many researchers have been focused on solving behavioral prediction problems for autonomous vehicles. However, very few of them consider multi-agent prediction under challenging driving scenarios such as urban environment. In this paper, we proposed a prediction method that is able to predict various complicated driving scenarios where heterogeneous road entities, signal lights, and static map information are taken into account. Moreover, t…
This study aims to explore the associations between near-crash events and road geometry and trip features by investigating a naturalistic driving dataset and a corresponding roadway inventory dataset using an association rule mining method.
Tshwane University of Technology（茨瓦内理工大学）；Central University of Technology（中央理工大学）
Autonomous driving systems are broadly used equipment in the industries and in our daily lives, they assist in production, but are majorly used for exploration in dangerous or unfamiliar locations. Thus, for a successful exploration, navigation plays a significant role. Road detection is an essential factor that assists autonomous robots achieved perfect navigation. Various techniques using camera sensors have been proposed by numerous scholars with inspiring results, but their techniques are still vulnerable to these environmental noises: rain, snow, light intensity and shadow. In addressing …
Road accidents are estimated to be the ninth leading cause of death across all age groups globally. 1.25 million people die annually from road accidents and Africa has the highest rate of road fatalities [1]. Research shows that three out of five road accidents are caused by driver-related behavioral factors [2]. Self-driving technology has the potential of saving lives lost to these preventable road accidents. Africa accounts for the majority of road fatalities and as such would benefit immensely from this technology. However, financial constraints prevent viable experimentation and research …
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）
Driving on roads is restricted by various traffic rules, aiming to ensure safety for all traffic participants. However, human road users usually do not adhere to these rules strictly, resulting in varying degrees of rule conformity. Such deviations from given rules are key components of today's road traffic. In autonomous driving, robotic agents can disturb traffic flow, when rule deviations are not taken into account. In this paper, we present an approach to derive the distribution of degrees of rule conformity from human driving data. We demonstrate our method with the Waymo Open Motion data…
Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua（奇瓦瓦自治大学）；Facultad de Ingeniería（工程学院）；Secretaría de Investigación y Posgrado（研究与研究生部）
Road transportation is of critical importance for a nation, having profound effects in the economy, the health and life style of its people. With the growth of cities and populations come bigger demands for mobility and safety, creating new problems and magnifying those of the past. New tools are needed to face the challenge, to keep roads in good conditions, their users safe, and minimize the impact on the environment. This dissertation is concerned with road quality assessment and aggressive driving, two important problems in road transportation, approached in the context of Intelligent Tran…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Tremendous progress in deep learning over the last years has led towards a future with autonomous vehicles on our roads. Nevertheless, the performance of their perception systems is strongly dependent on the quality of the utilized training data. As these usually only cover a fraction of all object classes an autonomous driving system will face, such systems struggle with handling the unexpected. In order to safely operate on public roads, the identification of objects from unknown classes remains a crucial task. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline to detect unknown objects. Instead of …
Road extraction is an essential step in building autonomous navigation systems. Detecting road segments is challenging as they are of varying widths, bifurcated throughout the image, and are often occluded by terrain, cloud, or other weather conditions. Using just convolution neural networks (ConvNets) for this problem is not effective as it is inefficient at capturing distant dependencies between road segments in the image which is essential to extract road connectivity. To this end, we propose a Spatial and Interaction Space Graph Reasoning (SPIN) module which when plugged into a ConvNet per…
RCP-RF: A Comprehensive Road-car-pedestrian Risk Management Framework based on Driving Risk Potential Field
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Anhui Engineering Laboratory for Intelligent Driving Technology（安徽省智能驾驶技术工程实验室）；Application and Innovation Research Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing C.A.S.（中国科学院机器人与智能制造应用创新研究院）
ROAD: Responsibility-Oriented Reward Design for Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving
Global Institute of Future Technology（未来技术全球研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；College of Humanities（人文学院）；Department of Automation（自动化系）；School of Aeronautics and Astronautics（航空宇航学院）
Mind2Drive: Predicting Driver Intentions from EEG in Real-world On-Road Driving
Department of Computer Science, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University（伊玛姆·莫哈默德·伊本·沙特伊斯兰大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University（努拉·本·阿卜杜勒拉赫曼大学计算机科学系）
We focus on the problem of predicting future states of entities in complex, real-world driving scenarios. Previous research has used low-level signals to predict short time horizons, and has not addressed how to leverage key assets relied upon heavily by industry self-driving systems: (1) large 3D perception efforts which provide highly accurate 3D states of agents with rich attributes, and (2) detailed and accurate semantic maps of the environment (lanes, traffic lights, crosswalks, etc). We present a unified representation which encodes such high-level semantic information in a spatial grid,…
Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm called Iterative Section Reduction (ISR) to automatically identify sub-intervals of spatiotemporal time series that are predictive of a target classification task. Specifically, using data collected from a driving simulator study, we identify which spatial regions (dubbed "sections") along the simulated routes tend to manifest driving behaviors that are predictive of the presence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Identifying these sections is important for two main reasons: (1) to improve predictive accuracy of the trained models b…
Woven Planet United Kingdom Limited（Woven Planet英国有限公司）；Woven Planet North America, Inc.（Woven Planet北美公司）
The goal of autonomous vehicles is to navigate public roads safely and comfortably. To enforce safety, traditional planning approaches rely on handcrafted rules to generate trajectories. Machine learning-based systems, on the other hand, scale with data and are able to learn more complex behaviors. However, they often ignore that agents and self-driving vehicle trajectory distributions can be leveraged to improve safety. In this paper, we propose modeling a distribution over multiple future trajectories for both the self-driving vehicle and other road agents, using a unified neural network arc…
Meta-Learning Online Dynamics Model Adaptation in Off-Road Autonomous Driving
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（喷气推进实验室、加州理工学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）；New York University（纽约大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
As part of a complete software stack for autonomous driving, NVIDIA has created a neural-network-based system, known as PilotNet, which outputs steering angles given images of the road ahead. PilotNet is trained using road images paired with the steering angles generated by a human driving a data-collection car. It derives the necessary domain knowledge by observing human drivers. This eliminates the need for human engineers to anticipate what is important in an image and foresee all the necessary rules for safe driving. Road tests demonstrated that PilotNet can successfully perform lane keepi…
