CARLA2Real: a tool for reducing the sim2real gap in CARLA simulator

Simulators are indispensable for research in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots and drones. Despite significant progress in various simulation aspects, such as graphical realism, an evident gap persists between the virtual and real-world environments. Since the ultimate goal is to deploy the autonomous systems in the real world, closing the sim2real gap is of utmost importance. In this paper, we employ a state-ofthe-art approach to enhance the photorealism of simulated data, aligning them with the visual characteristics of real-world datasets. Based on this, we developed CARLA2Real, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool (plug-in) for the widely used and open-source CARLA simulator. This tool enhances the output of CARLA in near realtime, achieving a frame rate of 13 FPS, translating it to the visual style and realism of real-world datasets such as Cityscapes, KITTI, and Mapillary Vistas. By employing the proposed tool, we generated synthetic datasets from both the simulator and the enhancement model outputs, including their corresponding ground truth annotations for tasks related to autonomous driving. Then, we performed a number of experiments to evaluate the impact of the proposed approach on feature extraction and semantic segmentation methods when trained on the enhanced synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the sim2real gap is significant and can indeed be reduced by the introduced approach.

Pedestrian-Aware Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving in Complex Urban Scenarios

Motion planning in uncertain environments like complex urban areas is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The aim of our research is to investigate how AVs can navigate crowded, unpredictable scenarios with multiple pedestrians while maintaining a safe and efficient vehicle behavior. So far, most research has concentrated on static or deterministic traffic participant behavior. This paper introduces a novel algorithm for motion planning in crowded spaces by combining social force principles for simulating realistic pedestrian behavior with a risk-aware motion planner. We evaluate this new algorithm in a 2D simulation environment to rigorously assess AV-pedestrian interactions, demonstrating that our algorithm enables safe, efficient, and adaptive motion planning, particularly in highly crowded urban environments - a first in achieving this level of performance. This study has not taken into consideration real-time constraints and has been shown only in simulation so far. Further studies are needed to investigate the novel algorithm in a complete software stack for AVs on real cars to investigate the entire perception, planning and control pipeline in crowded scenarios. We release the code developed in this research as an open-source resource for further studies and development. It can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/PedestrianAwareMotionPlanning

State Estimation Using Particle Filtering in Adaptive Machine Learning Methods: Integrating Q-Learning and NEAT Algorithms with Noisy Radar Measurements

Reliable state estimation is essential for autonomous systems operating in complex, noisy environments. Classical filtering approaches, such as the Kalman filter, can struggle when facing nonlinear dynamics or non-Gaussian noise, and even more flexible particle filters often encounter sample degeneracy or high computational costs in large-scale domains. Meanwhile, adaptive machine learning techniques, including Q-learning and neuroevolutionary algorithms such as NEAT, rely heavily on accurate state feedback to guide learning; when sensor data are imperfect, these methods suffer from degraded convergence and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that unifies particle filtering with Q-learning and NEAT to explicitly address the challenge of noisy measurements. By refining radar-based observations into reliable state estimates, our particle filter drives more stable policy updates (in Q-learning) or controller evolution (in NEAT), allowing both reinforcement learning and neuroevolution to converge faster, achieve higher returns or fitness, and exhibit greater resilience to sensor uncertainty. Experiments on grid-based navigation and a simulated car environment highlight consistent gains in training stability, final performance, and success rates over baselines lacking advanced filtering. Altogether, these findings underscore that accurate state estimation is not merely a preprocessing step, but a vital component capable of substantially enhancing adaptive machine learning in real-world applications plagued by sensor noise.

DKMGP: A Gaussian Process Approach to Multi-Task and Multi-Step Vehicle Dynamics Modeling in Autonomous Racing

Autonomous racing is gaining attention for its potential to advance autonomous vehicle technologies. Accurate race car dynamics modeling is essential for capturing and predicting future states like position, orientation, and velocity. However, accurately modeling complex subsystems such as tires and suspension poses significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce the Deep Kernel-based Multi-task Gaussian Process (DKMGP), which leverages the structure of a variational multi-task and multi-step Gaussian process model enhanced with deep kernel learning for vehicle dynamics modeling. Unlike existing single-step methods, DKMGP performs multi-step corrections with an adaptive correction horizon (ACH) algorithm that dynamically adjusts to varying driving conditions. To validate and evaluate the proposed DKMGP method, we compare the model performance with DKL-SKIP and a well-tuned single-track model, using high-speed dynamics data (exceeding 230kmph) collected from a full-scale Indy race car during the Indy Autonomous Challenge held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway at CES 2024. The results demonstrate that DKMGP achieves upto 99% prediction accuracy compared to one-step DKL-SKIP, while improving real-time computational efficiency by 1752x. Our results show that DKMGP is a scalable and efficient solution for vehicle dynamics modeling making it suitable for high-speed autonomous racing control.

Active Legibility in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

A multiagent sequential decision problem has been seen in many critical applications including urban transportation, autonomous driving cars, military operations, etc. Its widely known solution, namely multiagent reinforcement learning, has evolved tremendously in recent years. Among them, the solution paradigm of modeling other agents attracts our interest, which is different from traditional value decomposition or communication mechanisms. It enables agents to understand and anticipate others' behaviors and facilitates their collaboration. Inspired by recent research on the legibility that allows agents to reveal their intentions through their behavior, we propose a multiagent active legibility framework to improve their performance. The legibility-oriented framework allows agents to conduct legible actions so as to help others optimise their behaviors. In addition, we design a series of problem domains that emulate a common scenario and best characterize the legibility in multiagent reinforcement learning. The experimental results demonstrate that the new framework is more efficient and costs less training time compared to several multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms.

ITPNet: Towards Instantaneous Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Trajectory prediction of agents is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles, whereas previous approaches usually rely on sufficiently long-observed trajectory to predict the future trajectory of the agents. However, in real-world scenarios, it is not realistic to collect adequate observed locations for moving agents, leading to the collapse of most prediction models. For instance, when a moving car suddenly appears and is very close to an autonomous vehicle because of the obstruction, it is quite necessary for the autonomous vehicle to quickly and accurately predict the future trajectories of the car with limited observed trajectory locations. In light of this, we focus on investigating the task of instantaneous trajectory prediction, i.e., two observed locations are available during inference. To this end, we propose a general and plug-and-play instantaneous trajectory prediction approach, called ITPNet. Specifically, we propose a backward forecasting mechanism to reversely predict the latent feature representations of unobserved historical trajectories of the agent based on its two observed locations and then leverage them as complementary information for future trajectory prediction. Meanwhile, due to the inevitable existence of noise and redundancy in the predicted latent feature representations, we further devise a Noise Redundancy Reduction Former, aiming at to filter out noise and redundancy from unobserved trajectories and integrate the filtered features and observed features into a compact query for future trajectory predictions. In essence, ITPNet can be naturally compatible with existing trajectory prediction models, enabling them to gracefully handle the case of instantaneous trajectory prediction. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate ITPNet outperforms the baselines, and its efficacy with different trajectory prediction models.

Self-Driving Car Racing: Application of Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper explores the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques in the domain of autonomous self-driving car racing. Motivated by the rise of AI-driven mobility and autonomous racing events, the project aims to develop an AI agent that efficiently drives a simulated car in the OpenAI Gymnasium CarRacing environment. We investigate various RL algorithms, including Deep Q-Network (DQN), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and novel adaptations that incorporate transfer learning and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for enhanced performance. The project demonstrates that while DQN provides a strong baseline for policy learning, integrating ResNet and LSTM models significantly improves the agent's ability to capture complex spatial and temporal dynamics. PPO, particularly in continuous action spaces, shows promising results for fine control, although challenges such as policy collapse remain. We compare the performance of these approaches and outline future research directions focused on improving computational efficiency and addressing model stability. Our findings contribute to the ongoing development of AI systems in autonomous driving and related control tasks.

Enhanced Visual SLAM for Collision-free Driving with Lightweight Autonomous Cars

The paper presents a vision-based obstacle avoidance strategy for lightweight self-driving cars that can be run on a CPU-only device using a single RGB-D camera. The method consists of two steps: visual perception and path planning. The visual perception part uses ORBSLAM3 enhanced with optical flow to estimate the car's poses and extract rich texture information from the scene. In the path planning phase, we employ a method combining a control Lyapunov function and control barrier function in the form of quadratic program (CLF-CBF-QP) together with an obstacle shape reconstruction process (SRP) to plan safe and stable trajectories. To validate the performance and robustness of the proposed method, simulation experiments were conducted with a car in various complex indoor environments using the Gazebo simulation environment. Our method can effectively avoid obstacles in the scenes. The proposed algorithm outperforms benchmark algorithms in achieving more stable and shorter trajectories across multiple simulated scenes.

Want a Ride? Attitudes Towards Autonomous Driving and Behavior in Autonomous Vehicles

Research conducted previously has focused on either attitudes toward or behaviors associated with autonomous driving. In this paper, we bridge these two dimensions by exploring how attitudes towards autonomous driving influence behavior in an autonomous car. We conducted a field experiment with twelve participants engaged in non-driving related tasks. Our findings indicate that attitudes towards autonomous driving do not affect participants' driving interventions in vehicle control and eye glance behavior. Therefore, studies on autonomous driving technology lacking field tests might be unreliable for assessing the potential behaviors, attitudes, and acceptance of autonomous vehicles.

Knowledge Distillation Neural Network for Predicting Car-following Behaviour of Human-driven and Autonomous Vehicles

As we move towards a mixed-traffic scenario of Autonomous vehicles (AVs) and Human-driven vehicles (HDVs), understanding the car-following behaviour is important to improve traffic efficiency and road safety. Using a real-world trajectory dataset, this study uses descriptive and statistical analysis to investigate the car-following behaviours of three vehicle pairs: HDV-AV, AV-HDV and HDV-HDV in mixed traffic. The ANOVA test showed that car-following behaviours across different vehicle pairs are statistically significant (p-value < 0.05). We also introduce a data-driven Knowledge Distillation Neural Network (KDNN) model for predicting car-following behaviour in terms of speed. The KDNN model demonstrates comparable predictive accuracy to its teacher network, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and outperforms both the standalone student network, a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and traditional physics-based models like the Gipps model. Notably, the KDNN model better prevents collisions, measured by minimum Time-to-Collision (TTC), and operates with lower computational power, making it ideal for AVs or driving simulators requiring efficient computing.