Off-road navigation is a challenging problem both at the planning level to get a smooth trajectory and at the control level to avoid flipping over, hitting obstacles, or getting stuck at a rough patch. There have been several recent works using classical approaches involving depth map prediction followed by smooth trajectory planning and using a controller to track it. We design an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) system for an autonomous vehicle in off-road environments using a custom-designed simulator in the Unity game engine. We warm-start the agent by imitating a rule-based controller and utilize Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to improve the policy based on a reward that incorporates Control Barrier Functions (CBF), facilitating the agent's ability to generalize effectively to real-world scenarios. The training involves agents concurrently undergoing domain-randomized trials in various environments. We also propose a novel simulation environment to replicate off-road driving scenarios and deploy our proposed approach on a real buggy RC car.
Videos and additional results: https://sites.google.com/view/wroom-utd/home
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
One of the key challenges in high speed off road navigation on ground vehicles is that the kinodynamics of the vehicle terrain interaction can differ dramatically depending on the terrain. Previous approaches to addressing this challenge have considered learning an inverse kinodynamics (IKD) model, conditioned on inertial information of the vehicle to sense the kinodynamic interactions. In this paper, we hypothesize that to enable accurate high-speed off-road navigation using a learned IKD model, in addition to inertial information from the past, one must also anticipate the kinodynamic intera…
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）
Long-range indoor navigation requires guiding robots with noisy sensors and controls through cluttered environments along paths that span a variety of buildings. We achieve this with PRM-RL, a hierarchical robot navigation method in which reinforcement learning agents that map noisy sensors to robot controls learn to solve short-range obstacle avoidance tasks, and then sampling-based planners map where these agents can reliably navigate in simulation; these roadmaps and agents are then deployed on robots, guiding them along the shortest path where the agents are likely to succeed. Here we use …
With a great amount of research going on in the field of autonomous vehicles or self-driving cars, there has been considerable progress in road detection and tracking algorithms. Most of these algorithms use GPS to handle road junctions and its subsequent decisions. However, there are places in the urban environment where it becomes difficult to get GPS fixes which render the junction decision handling erroneous or possibly risky. Vision-based junction detection, however, does not have such problems. This paper proposes a novel deep convolutional neural network architecture for disambiguation …
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 …
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）
We present PRM-RL, a hierarchical method for long-range navigation task completion that combines sampling based path planning with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL agents learn short-range, point-to-point navigation policies that capture robot dynamics and task constraints without knowledge of the large-scale topology. Next, the sampling-based planners provide roadmaps which connect robot configurations that can be successfully navigated by the RL agent. The same RL agents are used to control the robot under the direction of the planning, enabling long-range navigation. We use the Probabili…
Tshwane University of Technology（茨瓦内理工大学）；University of Botswana（博茨瓦纳大学）
Road region recognition is a main feature that is gaining increasing attention from intellectuals because it helps autonomous vehicle to achieve a successful navigation without accident. However, different techniques based on camera sensor have been used by various researchers and outstanding results have been achieved. Despite their success, environmental noise like shadow leads to inaccurate recognition of road region which eventually leads to accident for autonomous vehicle. In this research, we conducted an investigation on shadow and its effects, optimized the road region recognition syst…
Reinforcement learning can enable robots to navigate to distant goals while optimizing user-specified reward functions, including preferences for following lanes, staying on paved paths, or avoiding freshly mowed grass. However, online learning from trial-and-error for real-world robots is logistically challenging, and methods that instead can utilize existing datasets of robotic navigation data could be significantly more scalable and enable broader generalization. In this paper, we present ReViND, the first offline RL system for robotic navigation that can leverage previously collected data …
Evaluation of Safety Constraints in Autonomous Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；AIRI（AIRI（人工智能研究所））；Federal Research Center for Computer Science and Control of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）
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…
Leveraging GNSS and Onboard Visual Data from Consumer Vehicles for Robust Road Network Estimation
Woven by Toyota, Inc.（丰田 woven 公司）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学机器人中心）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）
CNRS UMR 7253 Heudiasyc（法国国家科学研究中心 Heudiasyc 混合实验室）；Renault S.A.S（雷诺股份有限公司）
For an autonomous vehicle, situation understand-ing is a key capability towards safe and comfortable decision-making and navigation. Information is in general provided bymultiple sources. Prior information about the road topology andtraffic laws can be given by a High Definition (HD) map whilethe perception system provides the description of the spaceand of road entities evolving in the vehicle surroundings. Incomplex situations such as those encountered in urban areas,the road user behaviors are governed by strong interactionswith the others, and with the road network. In such situations,reli…
Mercedes-Benz AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰股份公司）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America（梅赛德斯-奔驰北美研发中心）
The prediction of surrounding agents' motion is a key for safe autonomous driving. In this paper, we explore navigation maps as an alternative to the predominant High Definition (HD) maps for learning-based motion prediction. Navigation maps provide topological and geometrical information on road-level, HD maps additionally have centimeter-accurate lane-level information. As a result, HD maps are costly and time-consuming to obtain, while navigation maps with near-global coverage are freely available. We describe an approach to integrate navigation maps into learning-based motion prediction mo…
We address the problem of ego-vehicle navigation in dense simulated traffic environments populated by road agents with varying driver behaviors. Navigation in such environments is challenging due to unpredictability in agents' actions caused by their heterogeneous behaviors. We present a new simulation technique consisting of enriching existing traffic simulators with behavior-rich trajectories corresponding to varying levels of aggressiveness. We generate these trajectories with the help of a driver behavior modeling algorithm. We then use the enriched simulator to train a deep reinforcement …
NavMapFusion: Diffusion-based Fusion of Navigation Maps for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction
Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, USA（梅赛德斯-奔驰北美研究与开发）；University of Stuttgart, Germany（斯图加特大学）；University of California, San Diego, USA（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Southampton, United Kingdom（南安普顿大学）
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) gives a great opportunity to develop an autonomous devices. The contribution of this work is an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model and its implementation for the detection of road cracks, potholes, and yellow lane in the road. The purpose of yellow lane detection and tracking is to realize autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by following yellow lane while detecting and reporting the road cracks and potholes to the server through WIFI or 5G medium. The fabrication of own data set is a hectic and time-consuming task. …
This paper proposes an SVM Enhanced Trajectory Planner for dynamic scenes, typically those encountered in on road settings. Frenet frame based trajectory generation is popular in the context of autonomous driving both in research and industry. We incorporate a safety based maximal margin criteria using a SVM layer that generates control points that are maximally separated from all dynamic obstacles in the scene. A kinematically consistent trajectory generator then computes a path through these waypoints. We showcase through simulations as well as real world experiments on a self driving car th…
Volvo Car Corporation（沃尔沃汽车公司）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
In this work, we address the problem of long-distance navigation for battery electric vehicles (BEVs), where one or more charging sessions are required to reach the intended destination. We consider the availability and performance of the charging stations to be unknown and stochastic, and develop a combinatorial semi-bandit framework for exploring the road network to learn the parameters of the queue time and charging power distributions. Within this framework, we first outline a pre-processing for the road network graph to handle the constrained combinatorial optimization problem in an effic…
Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）；Army Research Laboratory (ARL)（美国陆军研究实验室（ARL））
Ground robots require the crucial capability of traversing unstructured and unprepared terrains and avoiding obstacles to complete tasks in real-world robotics applications such as disaster response. When a robot operates in off-road field environments such as forests, the robot's actual behaviors often do not match its expected or planned behaviors, due to changes in the characteristics of terrains and the robot itself. Therefore, the capability of robot adaptation for consistent behavior generation is essential for maneuverability on unstructured off-road terrains. In order to address the ch…
Daimler AG R&D（戴姆勒股份公司研发部）；University of Ulm（乌尔姆大学）
This paper proposes an approach that predicts the road course from camera sensors leveraging deep learning techniques. Road pixels are identified by training a multi-scale convolutional neural network on a large number of full-scene-labeled night-time road images including adverse weather conditions. A framework is presented that applies the proposed approach to longer distance road course estimation, which is the basis for an augmented reality navigation application. In this framework long range sensor data (radar) and data from a map database are fused with short range sensor data (camera) t…
Federal University of Lavras（拉夫拉斯联邦大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
This paper presents a generic feature-based navigation framework for autonomous vehicles using a soft constrained Particle Filter. Selected map features, such as road and landmark locations, and vehicle states are used for designing soft constraints. After obtaining features of mapped landmarks in instance-based segmented images acquired from a monocular camera, vehicle-to-landmark distances are predicted using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) models in a mixture of experts approach. Both mean and variance outputs of GPR models are used for implementing adaptive constraints. Experimental resu…
Automotive Speed Estimation: Sensor Types and Error Characteristics from OBD-II to ADAS
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University at Kingston（电气与计算机工程系，昆士顿女王大学）；Navigation and Instrumentation (NavINST) Lab at the Royal Military College of Canada（加拿大皇家军事学院导航与仪器实验室）；School of Computing, Queen’s University at Kingston（计算学院，昆士顿女王大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军作战能力发展司令部陆军研究实验室）；Booz Allen Hamilton（博思艾伦汉密尔顿）
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised manner for these interactions. We propose a method that learns to predict traversability costmaps by combining exteroceptive environmental information with proprioceptive terrain interaction feedback in a self-supervised manner. Additionally, we propose a novel way of incorporating robot velocity in the costmap prediction pipeline. We validate our method in …
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能）
This paper presents a learning-based approach to consider the effect of unobservable world states in kinodynamic motion planning in order to enable accurate high-speed off-road navigation on unstructured terrain. Existing kinodynamic motion planners either operate in structured and homogeneous environments and thus do not need to explicitly account for terrain-vehicle interaction, or assume a set of discrete terrain classes. However, when operating on unstructured terrain, especially at high speeds, even small variations in the environment will be magnified and cause inaccurate plan execution.…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
The process of designing costmaps for off-road driving tasks is often a challenging and engineering-intensive task. Recent work in costmap design for off-road driving focuses on training deep neural networks to predict costmaps from sensory observations using corpora of expert driving data. However, such approaches are generally subject to over-confident mispredictions and are rarely evaluated in-the-loop on physical hardware. We present an inverse reinforcement learning-based method of efficiently training deep cost functions that are uncertainty-aware. We do so by leveraging recent advances …
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山国立科学技术院）
This paper presents a safe, efficient, and agile ground vehicle navigation algorithm for 3D off-road terrain environments. Off-road navigation is subject to uncertain vehicle-terrain interactions caused by different terrain conditions on top of 3D terrain topology. The existing works are limited to adopt overly simplified vehicle-terrain models. The proposed algorithm learns the terrain-induced uncertainties from driving data and encodes the learned uncertainty distribution into the traversability cost for path evaluation. The navigation path is then designed to optimize the uncertainty-aware …
Topological mapping for traversability-aware long-range navigation in off-road terrain
Center for Intelligent Machines, McGill University（麦吉尔大学智能机器中心）；Gault Nature Reserve（戈尔特自然保护区）；CMLabs（CMLabs公司）；National Canadian Robotics Network（加拿大国家机器人网络）
New York University（纽约大学）；Net-Scale Technologies（Net-Scale 科技公司）；NVIDIA Corp（英伟达公司）；North C Technologies（North C 科技公司）
A promising approach to autonomous driving is machine learning. In such systems, training datasets are created that capture the sensory input to a vehicle as well as the desired response. A disadvantage of using a learned navigation system is that the learning process itself may require a huge number of training examples and a large amount of computing. To avoid the need to collect a large training set of driving examples, we describe a system that takes advantage of the huge number of training examples provided by ImageNet, but is able to adapt quickly using a small training set for the speci…
Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）；US Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation methods cannot always be executed accurately due to setbacks such as wheel slip and reduced tire pressure. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach for consistent behavior generation that enables the ground robot's actual behaviors to more accurately match expected behaviors while adapting to a variety of unstructured off-road terrain. Our approac…
