With the evolution of self-driving cars, autonomous racing series like Roborace and the Indy Autonomous Challenge are rapidly attracting growing attention. Researchers participating in these competitions hope to subsequently transfer their developed functionality to passenger vehicles, in order to improve self-driving technology for reasons of safety, and due to environmental and social benefits. The race track has the advantage of being a safe environment where challenging situations for the algorithms are permanently created. To achieve minimum lap times on the race track, it is important to gather and process information about external influences including, e.g., the position of other cars and the friction potential between the road and the tires. Furthermore, the predicted behavior of the ego-car's propulsion system is crucial for leveraging the available energy as efficiently as possible. In this paper, we therefore present an optimization-based velocity planner, mathematically formulated as a multi-parametric Sequential Quadratic Problem (mpSQP). This planner can handle a spatially and temporally varying friction coefficient, and transfer a race Energy Strategy (ES) to the road. It further handles the velocity-profile-generation task for performance and emergency trajectories in real time on the vehicle's Electronic Control Unit (ECU).
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) …
Autonomous Driving Small-Scale Cars: A Survey of Recent Development
Chair of Econometrics and Statistics, esp. in the Transport Sector, Technische Universität Dresden（经济计量学与统计学教授席位（侧重交通领域））；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig（可扩展数据分析与人工智能中心（ScaDS.AI）德累斯顿/莱比锡）；Barkhausen Institut gGmbH（巴克豪森研究所）
The autonomous vehicle motion prediction literature is reviewed. Motion prediction is the most challenging task in autonomous vehicles and self-drive cars. These challenges have been discussed. Later on, the state-of-theart has reviewed based on the most recent literature and the current challenges are discussed. The state-of-the-art consists of classical and physical methods, deep learning networks, and reinforcement learning. prons and cons of the methods and gap of the research presented in this review. Finally, the literature surrounding object tracking and motion will be presented. As a r…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Motorsport has always been an enabler for technological advancement, and the same applies to the autonomous driving industry. The team TUM Auton-omous Motorsports will participate in the Indy Autonomous Challenge in Octo-ber 2021 to benchmark its self-driving software-stack by racing one out of ten autonomous Dallara AV-21 racecars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The first part of this paper explains the reasons for entering an autonomous vehicle race from an academic perspective: It allows focusing on several edge cases en-countered by autonomous vehicles, such as challenging evasion mane…
Learning Responsibility-Attributed Adversarial Scenarios for Testing Autonomous Vehicles
School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, U.K.（1 工程与物理科学学院，赫瑞-沃顿大学，爱丁堡，英国）；State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai, China（2 自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室，同济大学，上海，中国）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China（3 计算机科学与技术学院，吉林大学，长春，中国）；University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China（4 上海科技大学，上海，中国）；National Key Laboratory of Automotive Chassis Integration and Bionics, Jilin University, Changchun, China（5 汽车底盘集成与生物力学国家重点实验室，吉林大学，长春，中国）；Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hongkong, Hongkong, China（6 市政工程系，香港大学，香港，中国）
UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Road congestion induces significant costs across the world, and road network disturbances, such as traffic accidents, can cause highly congested traffic patterns. If a planner had control over the routing of all vehicles in the network, they could easily reverse this effect. In a more realistic scenario, we consider a planner that controls autonomous cars, which are a fraction of all present cars. We study a dynamic routing game, in which the route choices of autonomous cars can be controlled and the human drivers react selfishly and dynamically. As the problem is prohibitively large, we use d…
This paper presents a novel method for pedestrian detection and tracking by fusing camera and LiDAR sensor data. To deal with the challenges associated with the autonomous driving scenarios, an integrated tracking and detection framework is proposed. The detection phase is performed by converting LiDAR streams to computationally tractable depth images, and then, a deep neural network is developed to identify pedestrian candidates both in RGB and depth images. To provide accurate information, the detection phase is further enhanced by fusing multi-modal sensor information using the Kalman filte…
Autonomous cars can perform poorly for many reasons. They may have perception issues, incorrect dynamics models, be unaware of obscure rules of human traffic systems, or follow certain rules too conservatively. Regardless of the exact failure mode of the car, often human drivers around the car are behaving correctly. For example, even if the car does not know that it should pull over when an ambulance races by, other humans on the road will know and will pull over. We propose to make socially cohesive cars that leverage the behavior of nearby human drivers to act in ways that are safer and mor…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In autonomous driving, navigation through unsignaled intersections with many traffic participants moving around is a challenging task. To provide a solution to this problem, we propose a novel branched network G-CIL for the navigation policy learning. Specifically, we firstly represent such dynamic environments as graph-structured data and propose an effective strategy for edge definition to aggregate surrounding information for the ego-vehicle. Then graph convolutional neural networks are used as the perception module to capture global and geometric features from the environment. To generate …
In this tutorial, we detailed simple controllers for autonomous parking and path following for self-driving cars providing practical methods for curvature computation.
This paper proposes a mechanism to assess the safety of autonomous cars. It assesses the car's safety in scenarios where the car must avoid collision with an adversary. Core to this mechanism is a safety measure, called Safe-Kamikaze Distance (SKD), which computes the average similarity between sets of safe adversary's trajectories and kamikaze trajectories close to the safe trajectories. The kamikaze trajectories are generated based on planning under uncertainty techniques, namely the Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes, to account for the partially observed car policy from the poi…
One of the major open challenges in self-driving cars is the ability to detect cars and pedestrians to safely navigate in the world. Deep learning-based object detector approaches have enabled great advances in using camera imagery to detect and classify objects. But for a safety critical application, such as autonomous driving, the error rates of the current state of the art are still too high to enable safe operation. Moreover, the characterization of object detector performance is primarily limited to testing on prerecorded datasets. Errors that occur on novel data go undetected without add…
Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo（圣埃斯皮里图联邦大学）；Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo（圣埃斯皮里图联邦学院）
We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization de…
We present a scalable distributed target tracking algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers that is well-suited for a fleet of autonomous cars communicating over a vehicle-to-vehicle network. Each sensing vehicle communicates with its neighbors to execute iterations of a Kalman filter-like update such that each agent's estimate approximates the centralized maximum a posteriori estimate without requiring the communication of measurements. We show that our method outperforms the Consensus Kalman Filter in recovering the centralized estimate given a fixed communication ba…
In this paper, we develop a safe decision-making method for self-driving cars in a multi-lane, single-agent setting. The proposed approach utilizes deep reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve a high-level policy for safe tactical decision-making. We address two major challenges that arise solely in autonomous navigation. First, the proposed algorithm ensures that collisions never happen, and therefore accelerate the learning process. Second, the proposed algorithm takes into account the unobservable states in the environment. These states appear mainly due to the unpredictable behavior of othe…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Aptiv Services Deutschland GmbH（安波福服务德国有限公司）
The ability to predict the future movements of other vehicles is a subconscious and effortless skill for humans and key to safe autonomous driving. Therefore, trajectory prediction for autonomous cars has gained a lot of attention in recent years. It is, however, still a hard task to achieve human-level performance. Interdependencies between vehicle behaviors and the multimodal nature of future intentions in a dynamic and complex driving environment render trajectory prediction a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a new, data-driven approach for predicting the motion of vehicles in …
Avoiding unseen or partially occluded vulnerable road users (VRUs) is a major challenge for fully autonomous driving in urban scenes. However, occlusion-aware risk assessment systems have not been widely studied. Here, we propose a pedestrian emergence estimation and occlusion-aware risk assessment system for urban autonomous driving. First, the proposed system utilizes available contextual information, such as visible cars and pedestrians, to estimate pedestrian emergence probabilities in occluded regions. These probabilities are then used in a risk assessment framework, and incorporated into…
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…
A rigorous and comprehensive testing plays a key role in training self-driving cars to handle variety of situations that they are expected to see on public roads. The physical testing on public roads is unsafe, costly, and not always reproducible. This is where testing in simulation helps fill the gap, however, the problem with simulation testing is that it is only as good as the simulator used for testing and how representative the simulated scenarios are of the real environment. In this paper, we identify key requirements that a good simulator must have. Further, we provide a comparison of c…
Westview High School（韦斯特维尤高中）；Berkeley DeepDrive Center（伯克利深度驾驶中心）
Autonomous driving requires operation in different behavioral modes ranging from lane following and intersection crossing to turning and stopping. However, most existing deep learning approaches to autonomous driving do not consider the behavioral mode in the training strategy. This paper describes a technique for learning multiple distinct behavioral modes in a single deep neural network through the use of multi-modal multi-task learning. We study the effectiveness of this approach, denoted MultiNet, using self-driving model cars for driving in unstructured environments such as sidewalks and …
Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo（东京大学工业科学研究所）
Accuracy and time efficiency are two essential requirements for the self-localization of autonomous vehicles. While the observation range considered for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has a significant effect on both accuracy and computation time, its effect is not well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we will answer the question: How far should a driverless car observe during self-localization? We introduce a framework to dynamically define the observation range for localization to meet the accuracy requirement for autonomous driving, while keeping the computation …
Accurate localization is of crucial importance for autonomous driving tasks. Nowadays, we have seen a lot of sensor-rich vehicles (e.g. Robo-taxi) driving on the street autonomously, which rely on high-accurate sensors (e.g. Lidar and RTK GPS) and high-resolution map. However, low-cost production cars cannot afford such high expenses on sensors and maps. How to reduce costs? How do sensor-rich vehicles benefit low-cost cars? In this paper, we proposed a light-weight localization solution, which relies on low-cost cameras and compact visual semantic maps. The map is easily produced and updated …
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）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The emerging technology enabling autonomy in vehicles has led to a variety of new problems in transportation networks, such as planning and perception for autonomous vehicles. Other works consider social objectives such as decreasing fuel consumption and travel time by platooning. However, these strategies are limited by the actions of the surrounding human drivers. In this paper, we consider proactively achieving these social objectives by influencing human behavior through planned interactions. Our key insight is that we can use these social objectives to design local interactions that influ…
This paper presents the first evaluation of k-nearest neighbours-Averaging (kNN-Avg) on a real-world case study. kNN-Avg is a novel technique that tackles the challenges of noisy multi-objective optimisation (MOO). Existing studies suggest the use of repetition to overcome noise. In contrast, kNN-Avg approximates these repetitions and exploits previous executions, thereby avoiding the cost of re-running. We use kNN-Avg for the scenario generation of a real-world autonomous driving system (ADS) and show that it is better than the noisy baseline. Furthermore, we compare it to the repetition-meth…
In recent years, car makers and tech companies have been racing towards self driving cars. It seems that the main parameter in this race is who will have the first car on the road. The goal of this paper is to add to the equation two additional crucial parameters. The first is standardization of safety assurance --- what are the minimal requirements that every self-driving car must satisfy, and how can we verify these requirements. The second parameter is scalability --- engineering solutions that lead to unleashed costs will not scale to millions of cars, which will push interest in this fiel…
The control for aggressive driving of autonomous cars is challenging due to the presence of significant tyre slip. Data-driven and mechanism-based methods for the modeling and control of autonomous cars under aggressive driving conditions are limited in data efficiency and adaptability respectively. This paper is an attempt toward the fusion of the two classes of methods. By means of a modular design that is consisted of mechanism-based and data-driven components, and aware of the two-timescale phenomenon in the car model, our approach effectively improves over previous methods in terms of dat…
We present nuReality, a virtual reality 'VR' environment designed to test the efficacy of vehicular behaviors to communicate intent during interactions between autonomous vehicles 'AVs' and pedestrians at urban intersections. In this project we focus on expressive behaviors as a means for pedestrians to readily recognize the underlying intent of the AV's movements. VR is an ideal tool to use to test these situations as it can be immersive and place subjects into these potentially dangerous scenarios without risk. nuReality provides a novel and immersive virtual reality environment that include…
A convolutional neural network (CNN) approach is used to implement a level 2 autonomous vehicle by mapping pixels from the camera input to the steering commands. The network automatically learns the maximum variable features from the camera input, hence requires minimal human intervention. Given realistic frames as input, the driving policy trained on the dataset by NVIDIA and Udacity can adapt to real-world driving in a controlled environment. The CNN is tested on the CARLA open-source driving simulator. Details of a beta-testing platform are also presented, which consists of an ultrasonic se…
K. J. Somaiya College Of Engineering（K. J. 索马亚工程学院）；Startup School India（印度创业学校）
Self Driving Car technology is a vehicle that guides itself without human conduction. The first truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s with projects funded by DARPA( Defense Advance Research Project Agency ). Since then a lot has changed with the improvements in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. We have used the concept of behavioral cloning to convert a normal RC model car into an autonomous car using Deep Learning technology
Context: Competitions for self-driving cars facilitated the development and research in the domain of autonomous vehicles towards potential solutions for the future mobility. Objective: Miniature vehicles can bridge the gap between simulation-based evaluations of algorithms relying on simplified models, and those time-consuming vehicle tests on real-scale proving grounds. Method: This article combines findings from a systematic literature review, an in-depth analysis of results and technical concepts from contestants in a competition for self-driving miniature cars, and experiences of particip…
Simulation is a crucial tool for accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles. Making simulation realistic requires models of the human road users who interact with such cars. Such models can be obtained by applying learning from demonstration (LfD) to trajectories observed by cars already on the road. However, existing LfD methods are typically insufficient, yielding policies that frequently collide or drive off the road. To address this problem, we propose Symphony, which greatly improves realism by combining conventional policies with a parallel beam search. The beam search refines t…
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Safety is an important topic in autonomous driving since any collision may cause serious injury to people and damage to property. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability is a formal method that verifies safety in multi-agent interaction and provides a safety controller for collision avoidance. However, due to the worst-case assumption on the cars future behaviours, reachability might result in too much conservatism such that the normal operation of the vehicle is badly hindered. In this paper, we leverage the power of trajectory prediction and propose a prediction-based reachability framework to com…
Despite the advancement in the technology of autonomous driving cars, the safety of a self-driving car is still a challenging problem that has not been well studied. Motion prediction is one of the core functions of an autonomous driving car. Previously, we propose a novel scheme called GRIP which is designed to predict trajectories for traffic agents around an autonomous car efficiently. GRIP uses a graph to represent the interactions of close objects, applies several graph convolutional blocks to extract features, and subsequently uses an encoder-decoder long short-term memory (LSTM) model t…
With recent advances in learning algorithms and hardware development, autonomous cars have shown promise when operating in structured environments under good driving conditions. However, for complex, cluttered and unseen environments with high uncertainty, autonomous driving systems still frequently demonstrate erroneous or unexpected behaviors, that could lead to catastrophic outcomes. Autonomous vehicles should ideally adapt to driving conditions; while this can be achieved through multiple routes, it would be beneficial as a first step to be able to characterize Driveability in some quantif…
Autonomous robots are currently one of the most popular Artificial Intelligence problems, having experienced significant advances in the last decade, from Self-driving cars and humanoids to delivery robots and drones. Part of the problem is to get a robot to emulate the perception of human beings, our sense of sight, replacing the eyes with cameras and the brain with mathematical models such as Neural Networks. Developing an AI able to drive a car without human intervention and a small robot to deliver packages in the city may seem like different problems, nevertheless from the point of view o…
Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars
Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology（计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL），麻省理工学院）；Motional AD Inc.（Motional AD公司）；Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University（心理学系和大脑科学中心，哈佛大学）；Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（航空与宇航系，麻省理工学院）
School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学交通运输与物流学院）；Amazon Toronto（亚马逊多伦多分部）
When driving,it is vital to maintain the right following distance between the vehicles to avoid rear-end collisions. The minimum safe distance depends on many factors, however, in this study the safe distance between the human-driven vehicles and a fully autonomous vehicle at a sudden stop by an automatic emergency brake was studied based on the human driver ability to react in an accident, the vehicles' braking system performance, and the speed of vehicles. For this approach, a safe distance car-following model was proposed to describe the safe distance between vehicles on a single lane dry r…
Perception-driven approach and end-to-end system are two major vision-based frameworks for self-driving cars. However, it is difficult to introduce attention and historical information of autonomous driving process, which are the essential factors for achieving human-like driving into these two methods. In this paper, we propose a novel model for self-driving cars named brain-inspired cognitive model with attention (CMA). This model consists of three parts: a convolutional neural network for simulating human visual cortex, a cognitive map built to describe relationships between objects in comp…
Interacting with pedestrians is challenging for Autonomous vehicles (AVs). This study evaluates how AV operations /associated signaling and roadway infrastructure affect pedestrian behavior in virtual reality. AVs were designed with different operations and signal indications, including negotiating with no signal, negotiating with a yellow signal, and yellow/blue negotiating/no-yield indications. Results show that AV signal significantly impacts pedestrians' accepted gap, walking time, and waiting time. Pedestrians chose the largest open gap between cars with AV showing no signal, and had the …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Samsung AI Center (SAIC)（三星人工智能中心（SAIC））
The need to recognise long-term dependencies in sequential data such as video streams has made Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks a prominent Artificial Intelligence model for many emerging applications. However, the high computational and memory demands of LSTMs introduce challenges in their deployment on latency-critical systems such as self-driving cars which are equipped with limited computational resources on-board. In this paper, we introduce a progressive inference computing scheme that combines model pruning and computation restructuring leading to the best possible approximation o…
