Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userUrban Driving with Conditional Imitation Learning
177
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Jeffrey Hawke
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Hand-crafting generalised decision-making rules for real-world urban autonomous driving is hard. Alternatively, learning behaviour from easy-to-collect human driving demonstrations is appealing. Prior work has studied imitation learning (IL) for autonomous driving with a number of limitations. Examples include only performing lane-following rather than following a user-defined route, only using a single camera view or heavily cropped frames lacking state observability, only lateral (steering) control, but not longitudinal (speed) control and a lack of interaction with traffic. Importantly, the majority of such systems have been primarily evaluated in simulation - a simple domain, which lacks real-world complexities. Motivated by these challenges, we focus on learning representations of semantics, geometry and motion with computer vision for IL from human driving demonstrations. As our main contribution, we present an end-to-end conditional imitation learning approach, combining both lateral and longitudinal control on a real vehicle for following urban routes with simple traffic. We address inherent dataset bias by data balancing, training our final policy on approximately 30 hours of demonstrations gathered over six months. We evaluate our method on an autonomous vehicle by driving 35km of novel routes in European urban streets.
rate research
Read More
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 safe and efficient navigation policy, we further incorporate it with conditional imitation learning algorithm, to learn driving behaviors directly from expert demonstrations. Our proposed network is capable of handling a varying number of surrounding vehicles and generating optimal control actions (e.g., steering angle and throttle) according to the given high-level commands (e.g., turn left towards the global goal). Evaluations on unsignaled intersections with various traffic densities demonstrate that our end-to-end trainable neural network outperforms the baselines with higher success rate and shorter navigation time.
There is a prevailing trend to study urban morphology quantitatively thanks to the growing accessibility to various forms of spatial big data, increasing computing power, and use cases benefiting from such information. The methods developed up to now measure urban morphology with numerical indices describing density, proportion, and mixture, but they do not directly represent morphological features from the humans visual and intuitive perspective. We take the first step to bridge the gap by proposing a deep learning-based technique to automatically classify road networks into four classes on a visual basis. The method is implemented by generating an image of the street network (Colored Road Hierarchy Diagram), which we introduce in this paper, and classifying it using a deep convolutional neural network (ResNet-34). The model achieves an overall classification accuracy of 0.875. Nine cities around the world are selected as the study areas with their road networks acquired from OpenStreetMap. Latent subgroups among the cities are uncovered through clustering on the percentage of each road network category. In the subsequent part of the paper, we focus on the usability of such classification: we apply our method in a case study of urban vitality prediction. An advanced tree-based regression model (LightGBM) is for the first time designated to establish the relationship between morphological indices and vitality indicators. The effect of road network classification is found to be small but positively associated with urban vitality. This work expands the toolkit of quantitative urban morphology study with new techniques, supporting further studies in the future.
We present a training pipeline for the autonomous driving task given the current camera image and vehicle speed as the input to produce the throttle, brake, and steering control output. The simulator Airsims convenient weather and lighting API provides a sufficient diversity during training which can be very helpful to increase the trained policys robustness. In order to not limit the possible policys performance, we use a continuous and deterministic control policy setting. We utilize ResNet-34 as our actor and critic networks with some slight changes in the fully connected layers. Considering humans mastery of this task and the high-complexity nature of this task, we first use imitation learning to mimic the given human policy and leverage the trained policy and its weights to the reinforcement learning phase for which we use DDPG. This combination shows a considerable performance boost comparing to both pure imitation learning and pure DDPG for the autonomous driving task.
Humans are capable of learning a new behavior by observing others perform the skill. Robots can also implement this by imitation learning. Furthermore, if with external guidance, humans will master the new behavior more efficiently. So how can robots implement this? To address the issue, we present Federated Imitation Learning (FIL) in the paper. Firstly, a knowledge fusion algorithm deployed on the cloud for fusing knowledge from local robots is presented. Then, effective transfer learning methods in FIL are introduced. With FIL, a robot is capable of utilizing knowledge from other robots to increase its imitation learning. FIL considers information privacy and data heterogeneity when robots share knowledge. It is suitable to be deployed in cloud robotic systems. Finally, we conduct experiments of a simplified self-driving task for robots (cars). The experimental results demonstrate that FIL is capable of increasing imitation learning of local robots in cloud robotic systems.
End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving commonly rely on expert demonstrations. Although humans are good drivers, they are not good coaches for end-to-end algorithms that demand dense on-policy supervision. On the contrary, automated experts that leverage privileged information can efficiently generate large scale on-policy and off-policy demonstrations. However, existing automated experts for urban driving make heavy use of hand-crafted rules and perform suboptimally even on driving simulators, where ground-truth information is available. To address these issues, we train a reinforcement learning expert that maps birds-eye view images to continuous low-level actions. While setting a new performance upper-bound on CARLA, our expert is also a better coach that provides informative supervision signals for imitation learning agents to learn from. Supervised by our reinforcement learning coach, a baseline end-to-end agent with monocular camera-input achieves expert-level performance. Our end-to-end agent achieves a 78% success rate while generalizing to a new town and new weather on the NoCrash-dense benchmark and state-of-the-art performance on the more challenging CARLA LeaderBoard.
suggested questions
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
