Adaptive Decision Making at the Intersection for Autonomous Vehicles Based on Skill Discovery

In urban environments, the complex and uncertain intersection scenarios are challenging for autonomous driving. To ensure safety, it is crucial to develop an adaptive decision making system that can handle the interaction with other vehicles. Manually designed model-based methods are reliable in common scenarios. But in uncertain environments, they are not reliable, so learning-based methods are proposed, especially reinforcement learning (RL) methods. However, current RL methods need retraining when the scenarios change. In other words, current RL methods cannot reuse accumulated knowledge. They forget learned knowledge when new scenarios are given. To solve this problem, we propose a hierarchical framework that can autonomously accumulate and reuse knowledge. The proposed method combines the idea of motion primitives (MPs) with hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL). It decomposes complex problems into multiple basic subtasks to reduce the difficulty. The proposed method and other baseline methods are tested in a challenging intersection scenario based on the CARLA simulator. The intersection scenario contains three different subtasks that can reflect the complexity and uncertainty of real traffic flow. After offline learning and testing, the proposed method is proved to have the best performance among all methods.

High-precision target positioning system for unmanned vehicles based on binocular vision

Unmanned vehicles often need to locate targets with high precision during work. In the unmanned material handling workshop, the unmanned vehicle needs to perform high-precision pose estimation of the workpiece to accurately grasp the workpiece. In this context, this paper proposes a high-precision unmanned vehicle target positioning system based on binocular vision. The system uses a region-based stereo matching algorithm to obtain a disparity map, and uses the RANSAC algorithm to extract position and posture features, which achives the estimation of the position and attitude of a six-degree-of-freedom cylindrical workpiece. In order to verify the effect of the system, this paper collects the accuracy and calculation time of the output results of the cylinder in different poses. The experimental data shows that the position accuracy of the system is 0.61~1.17mm and the angular accuracy is 1.95~5.13{\deg}, which can achieve better high-precision positioning effect.