EditFollower: Tunable Car Following Models for Customizable Adaptive Cruise Control Systems

In the realm of driving technologies, fully autonomous vehicles have not been widely adopted yet, making advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) crucial for enhancing driving experiences. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) emerges as a pivotal component of ADAS. However, current ACC systems often employ fixed settings, failing to intuitively capture drivers' social preferences and leading to potential function disengagement. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Editable Behavior Generation (EBG) model, a data-driven car-following model that allows for adjusting driving discourtesy levels. The framework integrates diverse courtesy calculation methods into long short-term memory (LSTM) and Transformer architectures, offering a comprehensive approach to capture nuanced driving dynamics. By integrating various discourtesy values during the training process, our model generates realistic agent trajectories with different levels of courtesy in car-following behavior. Experimental results on the HighD and Waymo datasets showcase a reduction in Mean Squared Error (MSE) of spacing and MSE of speed compared to baselines, establishing style controllability. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first data-driven car-following model capable of dynamically adjusting discourtesy levels. Our model provides valuable insights for the development of ACC systems that take into account drivers' social preferences.

UAV-based Intelligent Information Systems on Winter Road Safety for Autonomous Vehicles

As autonomous vehicles continue to revolutionize transportation, addressing challenges posed by adverse weather conditions, particularly during winter, becomes paramount for ensuring safe and efficient operations. One of the most important aspects of a road safety inspection during adverse weather is when a limited lane width can reduce the capacity of the road and raise the risk of serious accidents involving autonomous vehicles. In this research, a method for improving driving challenges on roads in winter conditions, with a model that segments and estimates the width of the road from the perspectives of Uncrewed aerial vehicles and autonomous vehicles. The proposed approach in this article is needed to empower self-driving cars with up-to-date and accurate insights, enhancing their adaptability and decision-making capabilities in winter landscapes.

Multi-agent Path Finding for Mixed Autonomy Traffic Coordination

In the evolving landscape of urban mobility, the prospective integration of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) with Human-Driven Vehicles (HDVs) presents a complex array of challenges and opportunities for autonomous driving systems. While recent advancements in robotics have yielded Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms tailored for agent coordination task characterized by simplified kinematics and complete control over agent behaviors, these solutions are inapplicable in mixed-traffic environments where uncontrollable HDVs must coexist and interact with CAVs. Addressing this gap, we propose the Behavior Prediction Kinematic Priority Based Search (BK-PBS), which leverages an offline-trained conditional prediction model to forecast HDV responses to CAV maneuvers, integrating these insights into a Priority Based Search (PBS) where the A* search proceeds over motion primitives to accommodate kinematic constraints. We compare BK-PBS with CAV planning algorithms derived by rule-based car-following models, and reinforcement learning. Through comprehensive simulation on a highway merging scenario across diverse scenarios of CAV penetration rate and traffic density, BK-PBS outperforms these baselines in reducing collision rates and enhancing system-level travel delay. Our work is directly applicable to many scenarios of multi-human multi-robot coordination.

Design and Implementation of Smart Infrastructures and Connected Vehicles in A Mini-city Platform

This paper presents a 1/10th scale mini-city platform used as a testing bed for evaluating autonomous and connected vehicles. Using the mini-city platform, we can evaluate different driving scenarios including human-driven and autonomous driving. We provide a unique, visual feature-rich environment for evaluating computer vision methods. The conducted experiments utilize onboard sensors mounted on a robotic platform we built, allowing them to navigate in a controlled real-world urban environment. The designed city is occupied by cars, stop signs, a variety of residential and business buildings, and complex intersections mimicking an urban area. Furthermore, We have designed an intelligent infrastructure at one of the intersections in the city which helps safer and more efficient navigation in the presence of multiple cars and pedestrians. We have used the mini-city platform for the analysis of three different applications: city mapping, depth estimation in challenging occluded environments, and smart infrastructure for connected vehicles. Our smart infrastructure is among the first to develop and evaluate Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication at intersections. The intersection-related result shows how inaccuracy in perception, including mapping and localization, can affect safety. The proposed mini-city platform can be considered as a baseline environment for developing research and education in intelligent transportation systems.

Learning dynamics models for velocity estimation in autonomous racing

Velocity estimation is of great importance in autonomous racing. Still, existing solutions are characterized by limited accuracy, especially in the case of aggressive driving or poor generalization to unseen road conditions. To address these issues, we propose to utilize Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) with a learned dynamics model that is optimized directly for the state estimation task. Moreover, we propose to aid this model with the online-estimated friction coefficient, which increases the estimation accuracy and enables zero-shot adaptation to the new road conditions. To evaluate the UKF-based velocity estimator with the proposed dynamics model, we introduced a publicly available dataset of aggressive manoeuvres performed by an F1TENTH car, with sideslip angles reaching 40{\deg}. Using this dataset, we show that learning the dynamics model through UKF leads to improved estimation performance and that the proposed solution outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based state estimators by 17% in the nominal scenario. Moreover, we present unseen zero-shot adaptation abilities of the proposed method to the new road surface thanks to the use of the proposed learning-based tire dynamics model with online friction estimation.

A Game Between Two Identical Dubins Cars: Evading a Conic Sensor in Minimum Time

A fundamental task in mobile robotics is keeping an intelligent agent under surveillance with an autonomous robot as it travels in the environment. This work studies a version of that problem involving one of the most popular vehicle platforms in robotics. In particular, we consider two identical Dubins cars moving on a plane without obstacles. One of them plays as the pursuer, and it is equipped with a limited field-of-view detection region modeled as a semi-infinite cone with its apex at the pursuer's position. The pursuer aims to maintain the other Dubins car, which plays as the evader, as much time as possible inside its detection region. On the contrary, the evader wants to escape as soon as possible. In this work, employing differential game theory, we find the time-optimal motion strategies near the game's end. The analysis of those trajectories reveals the existence of at least two singular surfaces: a Transition Surface and an Evader's Universal Surface. We also found that the barrier's standard construction produces a surface that partially lies outside the playing space and fails to define a closed region, implying that an additional procedure is required to determine all configurations where the evader escapes.

3D StreetUnveiler with Semantic-Aware 2DGS

Unveiling an empty street from crowded observations captured by in-car cameras is crucial for autonomous driving. However, removing all temporary static objects, such as stopped vehicles and standing pedestrians, presents a significant challenge. Unlike object-centric 3D inpainting, which relies on thorough observation in a small scene, street scenes involve long trajectories that differ from previous 3D inpainting tasks. The camera-centric moving environment of captured videos further complicates the task due to the limited degree and time duration of object observation. To address these obstacles, we introduce StreetUnveiler to reconstruct an empty street. StreetUnveiler learns a 3D representation of the empty street from crowded observations. Our representation is based on the hard-label semantic 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) for its scalability and ability to identify Gaussians to be removed. We inpaint rendered image after removing unwanted Gaussians to provide pseudo-labels and subsequently re-optimize the 2DGS. Given its temporal continuous movement, we divide the empty street scene into observed, partial-observed, and unobserved regions, which we propose to locate through a rendered alpha map. This decomposition helps us to minimize the regions that need to be inpainted. To enhance the temporal consistency of the inpainting, we introduce a novel time-reversal framework to inpaint frames in reverse order and use later frames as references for earlier frames to fully utilize the long-trajectory observations. Our experiments conducted on the street scene dataset successfully reconstructed a 3D representation of the empty street. The mesh representation of the empty street can be extracted for further applications. Project page and more visualizations can be found at: https://streetunveiler.github.io

RePLAy: Remove Projective LiDAR Depthmap Artifacts via Exploiting Epipolar Geometry

3D sensing is a fundamental task for Autonomous Vehicles. Its deployment often relies on aligned RGB cameras and LiDAR. Despite meticulous synchronization and calibration, systematic misalignment persists in LiDAR projected depthmap. This is due to the physical baseline distance between the two sensors. The artifact is often reflected as background LiDAR incorrectly projected onto the foreground, such as cars and pedestrians. The KITTI dataset uses stereo cameras as a heuristic solution to remove artifacts. However most AV datasets, including nuScenes, Waymo, and DDAD, lack stereo images, making the KITTI solution inapplicable. We propose RePLAy, a parameter-free analytical solution to remove the projective artifacts. We construct a binocular vision system between a hypothesized virtual LiDAR camera and the RGB camera. We then remove the projective artifacts by determining the epipolar occlusion with the proposed analytical solution. We show unanimous improvement in the State-of-The-Art (SoTA) monocular depth estimators and 3D object detectors with the artifacts-free depthmaps.

MCDS-VSS: Moving Camera Dynamic Scene Video Semantic Segmentation by Filtering with Self-Supervised Geometry and Motion

Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, rely on reliable semantic environment perception for decision making. Despite great advances in video semantic segmentation, existing approaches ignore important inductive biases and lack structured and interpretable internal representations. In this work, we propose MCDS-VSS, a structured filter model that learns in a self-supervised manner to estimate scene geometry and ego-motion of the camera, while also estimating the motion of external objects. Our model leverages these representations to improve the temporal consistency of semantic segmentation without sacrificing segmentation accuracy. MCDS-VSS follows a prediction-fusion approach in which scene geometry and camera motion are first used to compensate for ego-motion, then residual flow is used to compensate motion of dynamic objects, and finally the predicted scene features are fused with the current features to obtain a temporally consistent scene segmentation. Our model parses automotive scenes into multiple decoupled interpretable representations such as scene geometry, ego-motion, and object motion. Quantitative evaluation shows that MCDS-VSS achieves superior temporal consistency on video sequences while retaining competitive segmentation performance.

Toward Autonomous Driving by Musculoskeletal Humanoids: A Study of Developed Hardware and Learning-Based Software

This paper summarizes an autonomous driving project by musculoskeletal humanoids. The musculoskeletal humanoid, which mimics the human body in detail, has redundant sensors and a flexible body structure. These characteristics are suitable for motions with complex environmental contact, and the robot is expected to sit down on the car seat, step on the acceleration and brake pedals, and operate the steering wheel by both arms. We reconsider the developed hardware and software of the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi in the context of autonomous driving. The respective components of autonomous driving are conducted using the benefits of the hardware and software. Finally, Musashi succeeded in the pedal and steering wheel operations with recognition.