Robust and persistent localisation is essential for ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. When operating in large and diverse urban driving environments, autonomous vehicles are frequently exposed to situations that violate the assumptions of algorithms, suffer from the failure of one or more sensors, or other events that lead to a loss of localisation.
This paper proposes the use of a behavior tree framework that can monitor the performance of localisation health metrics and triggers intelligent responses such as sensor switching and loss recovery. The algorithm presented selects the best available sensor data at given time and location, and can perform a series of actions to react to adverse situations. The behavior tree encapsulates the system-level logic to give commands that make up the intelligent behaviors, so that the localisation "actuators" (data association, optimisation, filters, etc) can perform decoupled actions without needing context. Experimental results to validate the algorithms are presented using the University of Sydney Campus dataset which was taken weekly over an 18 month period. A video showing the online localisation process can be found here: https://youtu.be/353uKqXLV5g
To improve the security and robustness of autonomous driving models, this paper presents SMET, a scenariobased metamorphic testing tool for autonomous driving models. The metamorphic relationship is divided into three dimensions (time, space, and event) and demonstrates its effectiveness through case studies in two types of autonomous driving models with different outputs.Experimental results show that this tool can well detect potential defects of the autonomous driving model, and complex scenes are more effective than simple scenes.
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,…
Since deep neural networks' resurgence, reinforcement learning has gradually strengthened and surpassed humans in many conventional games. However, it is not easy to copy these accomplishments to autonomous driving because state spaces are immensely complicated in the real world and action spaces are continuous and fine control is necessary. Besides, autonomous driving systems must also maintain their functionality regardless of the environment's complexity. The deep reinforcement learning domain (DRL) has become a robust learning framework to handle complex policies in high dimensional surrou…
This paper presents a noval method that generates optimal trajectories for autonomous vehicles for in-lane driving scenarios. The method computes a trajectory using a two-phase optimization procedure. In the first phase, the optimization procedure generates a close-form driving guide line with differetiable curvatures. In the second phase, the procedure takes the driving guide line as input, and outputs dynamically feasible, jerk and time optimal trajectories for vehicles driving along the guide line. This method is especially useful for generating trajectories at curvy road where the vehicles…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；University of Central Oklahoma（中央俄克拉荷马大学）；UNIST（蔚山国立科学技术院）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Autonomous driving has become real; semi-autonomous driving vehicles in an affordable price range are already on the streets, and major automotive vendors are actively developing full self-driving systems to deploy them in this decade. Before rolling the products out to the end-users, it is critical to test and ensure the safety of the autonomous driving systems, consisting of multiple layers intertwined in a complicated way. However, while safety-critical bugs may exist in any layer and even across layers, relatively little attention has been given to testing the entire driving system across …
Korea University（高丽大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University（高丽大学人工智能系）；ASRI, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学先进科学研究中心）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学机械工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学计算机科学与工程系）
Designing or learning an autonomous driving policy is undoubtedly a challenging task as the policy has to maintain its safety in all corner cases. In order to secure safety in autonomous driving, the ability to detect hazardous situations, which can be seen as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem, becomes crucial. However, most conventional datasets only provide expert driving demonstrations, although some non-expert or uncommon driving behavior data are needed to implement a safety guaranteed autonomous driving platform. To this end, we present a novel dataset called the R3 Driving …
Given the current point-to-point navigation capabilities of autonomous vehicles, researchers are looking into complex service requests that require the vehicles to visit multiple points of interest. In this paper, we develop a layered planning framework, called GLAD, for complex service requests in autonomous urban driving. There are three layers for service-level, behavior-level, and motion-level planning. The layered framework is unique in its tight coupling, where the different layers communicate user preferences, safety estimates, and motion costs for system optimization. GLAD is visually …
PerceptIn（感知创新公司）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
The infrastructure-vehicle cooperative autonomous driving approach depends on the cooperation between intelligent roads and intelligent vehicles. This approach is not only safer but also more economical compared to the traditional on-vehicle-only autonomous driving approach. In this paper, we introduce our real-world deployment experiences of cooperative autonomous driving, and delve into the details of new challenges and opportunities. Specifically, based on our progress towards commercial deployment, we follow a three-stage development roadmap of the cooperative autonomous driving approach:i…
Recent developments in autonomous driving technology have proven that map data may be used, not only for general routing purposes, but also for to enhance and complement common sensor data. This document reviews the most commonly used interfaces and formats at each step of a selfhealing map data chain.
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Due to the complex and dynamic character of intersection scenarios, the autonomous driving strategy at intersections has been a difficult problem and a hot point in the research of intelligent transportation systems in recent years. This paper gives a brief summary of state-of-the-art autonomous driving strategies at intersections. Firstly, we enumerate and analyze common types of intersection scenarios, corresponding simulation platforms, as well as related datasets. Secondly, by reviewing previous studies, we have summarized characteristics of existing autonomous driving strategies and class…
Our autonomous driving simulation lab produces a high-precision 3D model simulating the parking lot. However, the current model still has poor rendering quality in some aspects. In this work, we develop a system to improve the rendering of the model and evaluate the quality of the rendered model.
Towards Benchmarking and Assessing the Safety and Robustness of Autonomous Driving on Safety-critical Scenarios
Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Data Space, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心数据空间研究院）；Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
In order to operate safely on the road, autonomous vehicles need not only to be able to identify objects in front of them, but also to be able to estimate the risk level of the object in front of the vehicle automatically. It is obvious that different objects have different levels of danger to autonomous vehicles. An evaluation system is needed to automatically determine the danger level of the object for the autonomous vehicle. It would be too subjective and incomplete if the system were completely defined by humans. Based on this, we propose a framework based on nonparametric Bayesian learni…
Owing to the merits of early safety and reliability guarantee, autonomous driving virtual testing has recently gains increasing attention compared with closed-loop testing in real scenarios. Although the availability and quality of autonomous driving datasets and toolsets are the premise to diagnose the autonomous driving system bottlenecks and improve the system performance, due to the diversity and privacy of the datasets and toolsets, collecting and featuring the perspective and quality of them become not only time-consuming but also increasingly challenging. This paper first proposes a Sys…
Autonomous driving is a complex undertaking. A common approach is to break down the driving task into individual subtasks through modularization. These sub-modules are usually developed and published separately. However, if these individually developed algorithms have to be combined again to form a full-stack autonomous driving software, this poses particular challenges. Drawing upon our practical experience in developing the software of TUM Autonomous Motorsport, we have identified and derived these challenges in developing an autonomous driving software stack within a scientific environment.…
In a mixed-traffic scenario where both autonomous vehicles and human-driving vehicles exist, a timely prediction of driving intentions of nearby human-driving vehicles is essential for the safe and efficient driving of an autonomous vehicle. In this paper, a driving intention prediction method based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed for autonomous vehicles. HMMs representing different driving intentions are trained and tested with field collected data from a flyover. When training the models, either discrete or continuous characterization of the mobility features of vehicles is applied.…
Wayne State University（韦恩州立大学）；Anhui University（安徽大学）
The recent proliferation of computing technologies (e.g., sensors, computer vision, machine learning, and hardware acceleration), and the broad deployment of communication mechanisms (e.g., DSRC, C-V2X, 5G) have pushed the horizon of autonomous driving, which automates the decision and control of vehicles by leveraging the perception results based on multiple sensors. The key to the success of these autonomous systems is making a reliable decision in real-time fashion. However, accidents and fatalities caused by early deployed autonomous vehicles arise from time to time. The real traffic envir…
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Infrastructure-Vehicle Cooperative Autonomous Driving (IVCAD) is a new paradigm of autonomous driving, which relies on the cooperation between intelligent roads and autonomous vehicles. This paradigm has been shown to be safer and more efficient compared to the on-vehicle-only autonomous driving paradigm. Our real-world deployment data indicates that the effectiveness of IVCAD is constrained by reliability and performance of commercial communication networks. This paper targets this exact problem, and proposes INTERNEURON, a middleware to achieve high communication reliability between intellig…
Reinforcement learning has become one of the most trending subjects in the recent decade. It has seen applications in various fields such as robot manipulations, autonomous driving, path planning, computer gaming, etc. We accomplished three tasks during the course of this project. Firstly, we studied the Q-learning algorithm for tabular environments and applied it successfully to an OpenAi Gym environment, Taxi. Secondly, we gained an understanding of and implemented the deep Q-network algorithm for Cart-Pole environment. Thirdly, we also studied the application of reinforcement learning in au…
Autonomous driving has been among the most popular and challenging topics in the past few years. On the road to achieving full autonomy, researchers have utilized various sensors, such as LiDAR, camera, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and GPS, and developed intelligent algorithms for autonomous driving applications such as object detection, object segmentation, obstacle avoidance, and path planning. High-definition (HD) maps have drawn lots of attention in recent years. Because of the high precision and informative level of HD maps in localization, it has immediately become one of the critica…
This paper issues an integrated control system of self-driving autonomous vehicles based on the personal driving preference to provide personalized comfortable driving experience to autonomous vehicle users. We propose an Occupant's Preference Metric (OPM) which is defining a preferred lateral and longitudinal acceleration region with maximum allowable jerk for users. Moreover, we propose a vehicle controller based on control parameters enabling integrated lateral and longitudinal control via preference-aware maneuvering of autonomous vehicles. The proposed system not only provides the criteri…
The three keys to autonomous driving are sensors, data integration, and 100% safety decisions. In the past, due to the high latency and low reliability of the network, many decisions had to be made locally in the vehicle. This puts high demands on the vehicle itself, which results in the dilatory commercialization of automatic driving. With the advent of 5G, these situations will be greatly improved. In this paper, we present the improvements that 5G technology brings to autonomous vehicles especially in terms of latency and reliability amongst the multitude of other factors. The paper analyze…
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 …
A Framework for a Capability-driven Evaluation of Scenario Understanding for Multimodal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving
Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG（保时捷股份公司）；Forschungszentrum Informatik（弗劳恩霍夫信息技术研究中心）；Hochschule Esslingen（埃斯林根应用技术大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Voxel51；Karlsruher Institut für Technologie（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Kookmin University（国民大学）
The increasing computing demands of autonomous driving applications make energy optimizations critical for reducing battery capacity and vehicle weight. Current energy optimization methods typically target traditional real-time systems with static deadlines, resulting in conservative energy savings that are unable to exploit additional energy optimizations due to dynamic deadlines arising from the vehicle's change in velocity and driving context. We present an adaptive system optimization and reconfiguration approach that dynamically adapts the scheduling parameters and processor speeds to sat…
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…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In recent years, control under urban intersection scenarios becomes an emerging research topic. In such scenarios, the autonomous vehicle confronts complicated situations since it must deal with the interaction with social vehicles timely while obeying the traffic rules. Generally, the autonomous vehicle is supposed to avoid collisions while pursuing better efficiency. The existing work fails to provide a framework that emphasizes the integrity of the scenarios while being able to deploy and test reinforcement learning(RL) methods. Specifically, we propose a benchmark for training and testing …
Autonomous driving technologies are expected to not only improve mobility and road safety but also bring energy efficiency benefits. In the foreseeable future, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will operate on roads shared with human-driven vehicles. To maintain safety and liveness while simultaneously minimizing energy consumption, the AV planning and decision-making process should account for interactions between the autonomous ego vehicle and surrounding human-driven vehicles. In this chapter, we describe a framework for developing energy-efficient autonomous driving policies on shared roads by exp…
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…
