CARLA Real Traffic Scenarios -- novel training ground and benchmark for autonomous driving
University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院数学研究所）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；Volkswagen AG（大众汽车集团）；Google（谷歌）
Błażej Osiński, Piotr Miłoś, Adam Jakubowski, Paweł Zięcina, Michał Martyniak, Christopher Galias, Antonia Breuer, Silviu Homoceanu, Henryk Michalewski
This work introduces interactive traffic scenarios in the CARLA simulator, which are based on real-world traffic. We concentrate on tactical tasks lasting several seconds, which are especially challenging for current control methods. The CARLA Real Traffic Scenarios (CRTS) is intended to be a training and testing ground for autonomous driving systems. To this end, we open-source the code under a permissive license and present a set of baseline policies. CRTS combines the realism of traffic scenarios and the flexibility of simulation. We use it to train agents using a reinforcement learning algorithm. We show how to obtain competitive polices and evaluate experimentally how observation types and reward schemes affect the training process and the resulting agent's behavior.
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Intel Labs（英特尔研究院）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Despite recent advances in autonomous driving systems, accidents such as the fatal Uber crash in 2018 show these systems are still susceptible to edge cases. Such systems must be thoroughly tested and validated before being deployed in the real world to avoid such events. Testing in open-world scenarios can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. These challenges can be addressed by using driving simulators such as CARLA instead. A key part of such tests is adversarial testing, in which the goal is to find scenarios that lead to failures of the given system. While several independent effo…
Despite the rapid improvement of autonomous driving technology in recent years, automotive manufacturers must resolve liability issues to commercialize autonomous passenger car of SAE J3016 Level 3 or higher. To cope with the product liability law, manufacturers develop autonomous driving systems in compliance with international standards for safety such as ISO 26262 and ISO 21448. Concerning the safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) requirement in ISO 26262, the driving policy recommends providing an explicit rational basis for maneuver decisions. In this case, mathematical models such…
The objective of the first CARLA autonomous driving challenge was to deploy autonomous driving systems to lead with complex traffic scenarios where all participants faced the same challenging traffic situations. According to the organizers, this competition emerges as a way to democratize and to accelerate the research and development of autonomous vehicles around the world using the CARLA simulator contributing to the development of the autonomous vehicle area. Therefore, this paper presents the architecture design for the navigation of an autonomous vehicle in a simulated urban environment t…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
With the continuous development of science and technology, self-driving vehicles will surely change the nature of transportation and realize the automotive industry's transformation in the future. Compared with self-driving cars, self-driving buses are more efficient in carrying passengers and more environmentally friendly in terms of energy consumption. Therefore, it is speculated that in the future, self-driving buses will become more and more important. As a simulator for autonomous driving research, the CARLA simulator can help people accumulate experience in autonomous driving technology …
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute（密歇根大学交通研究所）
Traffic simulation is an efficient and cost-effective way to test Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) in a complex and dynamic environment. Numerous studies have been conducted for AV evaluation using traffic simulation over the past decades. However, the current simulation environments fall behind on two fronts -- the background vehicles (BVs) fail to simulate naturalistic driving behavior and the existing environments do not test the entire pipeline in a modular fashion. This study aims to propose a simulation framework that creates a complex and naturalistic traffic environment. Specifically, we comb…
CARJAN: Agent-Based Generation and Simulation of Traffic Scenarios with AJAN
institutetext: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbruecken, Germany（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI）萨尔兰州信息学校区，萨尔布吕肯，德国）
本文提出 CARJAN，结合 AJAN 与 CARLA，通过可视化建模、SPARQL 行为树决策和多智能体交互，实现城市交通场景的半自动生成与仿真。
University of Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
The role of simulation in autonomous driving is becoming increasingly important due to the need for rapid prototyping and extensive testing. The use of physics-based simulation involves multiple benefits and advantages at a reasonable cost while eliminating risks to prototypes, drivers and vulnerable road users. However, there are two main limitations. First, the well-known reality gap which refers to the discrepancy between reality and simulation that prevents simulated autonomous driving experience from enabling effective real-world performance. Second, the lack of empirical knowledge about …
Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)
Sch. of CS, Sch. of AIS, Sch. of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（计算机科学学院、人工智能科学学院、人工智能学院，上海交通大学）；Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University（可信具身人工智能研究院，复旦大学）；AgiBot
Learning to drive faithfully in highly stochastic urban settings remains an open problem. To that end, we propose a Multi-task Learning from Demonstration (MT-LfD) framework which uses supervised auxiliary task prediction to guide the main task of predicting the driving commands. Our framework involves an end-to-end trainable network for imitating the expert demonstrator's driving commands. The network intermediately predicts visual affordances and action primitives through direct supervision which provide the aforementioned auxiliary supervised guidance. We demonstrate that such joint learnin…
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…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles has been continually delayed due to safety concerns. On the one hand, comprehensive scene understanding is indispensable, a lack of which would result in vulnerability to rare but complex traffic situations, such as the sudden emergence of unknown objects. However, reasoning from a global context requires access to sensors of multiple types and adequate fusion of multi-modal sensor signals, which is difficult to achieve. On the other hand, the lack of interpretability in learning models also hampers the safety with unverifiable failure causes. In t…
In this paper, we present a system to train driving policies from experiences collected not just from the ego-vehicle, but all vehicles that it observes. This system uses the behaviors of other agents to create more diverse driving scenarios without collecting additional data. The main difficulty in learning from other vehicles is that there is no sensor information. We use a set of supervisory tasks to learn an intermediate representation that is invariant to the viewpoint of the controlling vehicle. This not only provides a richer signal at training time but also allows more complex reasonin…
DriveE2E: Closed-Loop Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Real-to-Simulation
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；AIR, Tsinghua University（清华研究院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Tuojing Intelligence（途镜智能）
Virtual Roads, Smarter Safety: A Digital Twin Framework for Mixed Autonomous Traffic Safety Analysis
Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University（土木与环境工程系，德克萨斯A&M大学）；Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning（景观建筑与城市规划系）
From Imitation to Exploration: End-to-end Autonomous Driving based on World Model
Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（自动化系，上海交通大学）；Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China（系统控制与信息处理重点实验室，中华人民共和国教育部）；Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（未来技术全球研究院，上海交通大学）
Univ Paris Est Creteil（巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）；Huawei Technologies France（华为技术法国公司）
Traffic simulation has gained a lot of interest for quantitative evaluation of self driving vehicles performance. In order for a simulator to be a valuable test bench, it is required that the driving policy animating each traffic agent in the scene acts as humans would do while maintaining minimal safety guarantees. Learning the driving policies of traffic agents from recorded human driving data or through reinforcement learning seems to be an attractive solution for the generation of realistic and highly interactive traffic situations in uncontrolled intersections or roundabouts. In this work…
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) i.e., self-driving cars, operate in a safety critical domain, since errors in the autonomous driving software can lead to huge losses. Statistically, road intersections which are a part of the AVs operational design domain (ODD), have some of the highest accident rates. Hence, testing AVs to the limits on road intersections and assuring their safety on road intersections is pertinent, and thus the focus of this paper. We present a situation coverage-based (SitCov) AV-testing framework for the verification and validation (V&V) and safety assurance of AVs, developed in …
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Current end-to-end autonomous driving methods either run a controller based on a planned trajectory or perform control prediction directly, which have spanned two separately studied lines of research. Seeing their potential mutual benefits to each other, this paper takes the initiative to explore the combination of these two well-developed worlds. Specifically, our integrated approach has two branches for trajectory planning and direct control, respectively. The trajectory branch predicts the future trajectory, while the control branch involves a novel multi-step prediction scheme such that th…
In this paper, we continue our prior work on using imitation learning (IL) and model free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn driving policies for autonomous driving in urban scenarios, by introducing a model based RL method to drive the autonomous vehicle in the Carla urban driving simulator. Although IL and model free RL methods have been proved to be capable of solving lots of challenging tasks, including playing video games, robots, and, in our prior work, urban driving, the low sample efficiency of such methods greatly limits their applications on actual autonomous driving. In this work,…
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
We present a novel hybrid learning method, HyLEAR, for solving the collision-free navigation problem for self-driving cars in POMDPs. HyLEAR leverages interposed learning to embed knowledge of a hybrid planner into a deep reinforcement learner to faster determine safe and comfortable driving policies. In particular, the hybrid planner combines pedestrian path prediction and risk-aware path planning with driving-behavior rule-based reasoning such that the driving policies also take into account, whenever possible, the ride comfort and a given set of driving-behavior rules. Our experimental perf…
Liverpool John Moores University（利物浦约翰摩尔大学）；Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（塔帕尔工程技术学院）
Urban autonomous driving is an open and challenging problem to solve as the decision-making system has to account for several dynamic factors like multi-agent interactions, diverse scene perceptions, complex road geometries, and other rarely occurring real-world events. On the other side, with deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques, agents have learned many complex policies. They have even achieved super-human-level performances in various Atari Games and Deepmind's AlphaGo. However, current DRL techniques do not generalize well on complex urban driving scenarios. This paper introduces t…
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学电子信息工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学轨道交通控制与安全国家重点实验室）
High-level driving behavior decision-making is an open-challenging problem for connected vehicle technology, especially in heterogeneous traffic scenarios. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning based high-level driving behavior decision-making approach is proposed for connected vehicle in heterogeneous traffic situations. The model is composed of three main parts: a data preprocessor that maps hybrid data into a data format called hyper-grid matrix, a two-stream deep neural network that extracts the hidden features, and a deep reinforcement learning network that learns the optimal polic…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；College of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学自动化与电气工程学院）
Multi-task intersection navigation including the unprotected turning left, turning right, and going straight in dense traffic is still a challenging task for autonomous driving. For the human driver, the negotiation skill with other interactive vehicles is the key to guarantee safety and efficiency. However, it is hard to balance the safety and efficiency of the autonomous vehicle for multi-task intersection navigation. In this paper, we formulate a multi-task safe reinforcement learning with social attention to improve the safety and efficiency when interacting with other traffic participants…
HyPlan: Hybrid Learning-Assisted Planning Under Uncertainty for Safe Autonomous Driving
Saarland University, Computer Science Dept.（萨尔兰大学计算机科学系）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)（法国国家科学研究中心）
Traditional decision and planning frameworks for self-driving vehicles (SDVs) scale poorly in new scenarios, thus they require tedious hand-tuning of rules and parameters to maintain acceptable performance in all foreseeable cases. Recently, self-driving methods based on deep learning have shown promising results with better generalization capability but less hand engineering effort. However, most of the previous learning-based methods are trained and evaluated in limited driving scenarios with scattered tasks, such as lane-following, autonomous braking, and conditional driving. In this paper,…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；PSL（巴黎文理研究大学）；Valeo Driving Assistance Research Valeo.ai（法雷奥驾驶辅助研究法雷奥人工智能）
Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal behavior policy from its own experiments and not rule-based control methods. However, there is no RL algorithm yet capable of handling a task as difficult as urban driving. We present a novel technique, coined implicit affordances, to effectively leverage RL for urban driving thus including lane keeping, pedestrians and vehicles avoidance, and traffic light detection. To our knowledge we are the first to present a successful RL agent handling such a complex task especially regarding the traffic light detection. Furthermore, we have demons…
PRIBOOT: A New Data-Driven Expert for Improved Driving Simulations
University of Aveiro（阿威罗大学）；Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA)（阿威罗电子与信息工程研究所）；Intelligent System Associate Laboratory (LASI)（智能系统联合实验室）；Computer Vision Center (CVC)（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB)（巴塞罗那自治大学）
