Differentiable simulators represent an environment's dynamics as a differentiable function. Within robotics and autonomous driving, this property is used in Analytic Policy Gradients (APG), which relies on backpropagating through the dynamics to train accurate policies for diverse tasks. Here we show that differentiable simulation also has an important role in world modeling, where it can impart predictive, prescriptive, and counterfactual capabilities to an agent. Specifically, we design three novel task setups in which the differentiable dynamics are combined within an end-to-end computation graph not with a policy, but a state predictor. This allows us to learn relative odometry, optimal planners, and optimal inverse states. We collectively call these predictors Analytic World Models (AWMs) and demonstrate how differentiable simulation enables their efficient, end-to-end learning. In autonomous driving scenarios, they have broad applicability and can augment an agent's decision-making beyond reactive control.
VEDECOM Institute（VEDECOM研究所）；French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis（圣路易法德研究所）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；CentraleSupelec（中央理工-高等电力学院）
Nowadays, supervised deep learning techniques yield the best state-of-the-art prediction performances for a wide variety of computer vision tasks. However, such supervised techniques generally require a large amount of manually labeled training data. In the context of autonomous vehicles perception, this requirement is critical, as the distribution of sensor data can continuously change and include several unexpected variations. It turns out that a category of learning techniques, referred to as self-supervised learning (SSL), consists of replacing the manual labeling effort by an automatic la…
LADARs mounted on mobile platforms produce a wealth of precise range data on the surrounding objects and vehicles. The challenge we address is to infer from these raw LADAR data the location and orientation of nearby vehicles. We propose a novel view-dependent adaptive matched filter for obtaining fast and precise measurements of target vehicle pose. We derive an analytic expression for the matching function which we optimize to obtain target pose and size. Our algorithm is fast, robust and simple to implement compared to other methods. When used as the measurement component of a tracker on an…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Clausthal University of Technology（克劳斯塔尔工业大学）
In mixed traffic scenarios, a certain number of pedestrians might coexist in a small area while interacting with vehicles. In this situation, every pedestrian must simultaneously react to the surrounding pedestrians and vehicles. Analytical modeling of such collective pedestrian motion can benefit intelligent transportation practices like shared space design and urban autonomous driving. This work proposed the sub-goal social force model (SG-SFM) to describe the collective pedestrian motion under vehicle influence. The proposed model introduced a new design of vehicle influence on pedestrian m…
Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学澳大利亚野外机器人中心）
Social acceptance is a major hurdle for autonomous vehicle technology, central to which is ensuring both passengers and nearby pedestrians feel safe. This idea of `feeling safe' and perceived safety is highly subjective and rooted in human intuition. As such, traditional analytical approaches to autonomous navigation often fail to cater for the social expectations of individuals. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to capture the complexity of social expectations and integrate this complexity into a 3-layered Contextual Speed Controller. The layers were; the legal road speed limit, the …
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this work, we introduce a microscopic traffic flow model called Scalar Capacity Model (SCM) which can be used to study the formation of traffic on an airway link for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as well as for the ground vehicles on the road. Given the 3D nature of UAV flights, the main novelty in our model is to eliminate the commonly used notion of lanes and replace it with a notion of density and capacity of flow, but in such a way that individual vehicle motions can still be modeled. We name this a Density/Capacity View (DCV) of the link capacity and how vehicles utilize it…
Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校土木、建筑与环境工程系）；Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology（巴布里·纳希里万理工大学电气与计算机工程学院）；Transportation Research Institute (IMOB), UHasselt-Hasselt University（乌赫斯泰特大学交通研究所）；Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology（巴布里·纳希里万理工大学机械工程学院）；Department of Computer Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology（阿姆irkabir技术大学计算机工程系）
University of Maryland Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Vehicles are becoming more and more connected, this opens up a larger attack surface which not only affects the passengers inside vehicles, but also people around them. These vulnerabilities exist because modern systems are built on the comparatively less secure and old CAN bus framework which lacks even basic authentication. Since a new protocol can only help future vehicles and not older vehicles, our approach tries to solve the issue as a data analytics problem and use machine learning techniques to secure cars. We develop a Hidden Markov Model to detect anomalous states from real data coll…
University of Nottingham Ningbo China（宁波诺丁汉大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；China University of Geosciences, Beijing（中国地质大学（北京））；National University of Defence Technology（国防科技大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；University of Nottingham Malaysia（诺丁汉大学马来西亚校区）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most intensively studied combinatorial optimisation problems for which numerous models and algorithms have been proposed. To tackle the complexities, uncertainties and dynamics involved in real-world VRP applications, Machine Learning (ML) methods have been used in combination with analytical approaches to enhance problem formulations and algorithmic performance across different problem solving scenarios. However, the relevant papers are scattered in several traditional research fields with very different, sometimes confusing, terminologies. This…
The University of Alabama（阿拉巴马大学）；Alabama Transportation Institute（阿拉巴马交通研究所）
Human trafficking is a universal problem, persistent despite numerous efforts to combat it globally. Individuals of any age, race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status, cultural background, religion, socioeconomic class, and education can be a victim of human trafficking. With the advancements in technology and the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs), human traffickers will adopt new ways to transport victims, which could accelerate the growth of organized human trafficking networks, which can make the detection of trafficking in persons mo…
This research proposal aims to use cognitive methods to analyze the quality of roads based on the new proposed technology called Cognitive Internet of Vehicles (CIoV). By using Big Data corresponding to the collected data of autonomous vehicles, we can apply cognitive analytics to a huge amount of transportation data. This process can help us to create valuable information such as road quality from an immense volume of meaningless data. In this proposal, we are going to focus on the quality of roads for various business and commercial purposes. The proposed system can be used as an additional …
Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）；Benha University（本哈大学）
Smart traffic engineering and intelligent transportation services are in increasing demand from governmental authorities to optimize traffic performance and thus reduce energy costs, increase the drivers' safety and comfort, ensure traffic laws enforcement, and detect traffic violations. In this paper, we address this challenge, and we leverage the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to develop an AI-integrated video analytics framework, called TAU (Traffic Analysis from UAVs), for automated traffic analytics and understanding. Unlike previous works on traff…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are inevitably entering our lives with potential benefits for improved traffic safety, mobility, and accessibility. However, AVs' benefits also introduce a serious potential challenge, in the form of complex interactions with human-driven vehicles (HVs). The emergence of AVs introduces uncertainty in the behavior of human actors and in the impact of the AV manufacturer on autonomous driving design. This paper thus aims to investigate how AVs affect road safety and to design socially optimal liability rules for AVs and human drivers. A unified game is developed, includ…
