Learn 2 Rage: Experiencing The Emotional Roller Coaster That Is Reinforcement Learning

This work presents the experiments and solution outline for our teams winning submission in the Learn To Race Autonomous Racing Virtual Challenge 2022 hosted by AIcrowd. The objective of the Learn-to-Race competition is to push the boundary of autonomous technology, with a focus on achieving the safety benefits of autonomous driving. In the description the competition is framed as a reinforcement learning (RL) challenge. We focused our initial efforts on implementation of Soft Actor Critic (SAC) variants. Our goal was to learn non-trivial control of the race car exclusively from visual and geometric features, directly mapping pixels to control actions. We made suitable modifications to the default reward policy aiming to promote smooth steering and acceleration control. The framework for the competition provided real time simulation, meaning a single episode (learning experience) is measured in minutes. Instead of pursuing parallelisation of episodes we opted to explore a more traditional approach in which the visual perception was processed (via learned operators) and fed into rule-based controllers. Such a system, while not as academically "attractive" as a pixels-to-actions approach, results in a system that requires less training, is more explainable, generalises better and is easily tuned and ultimately out-performed all other agents in the competition by a large margin.

Multi-Uncertainty Aware Autonomous Cooperative Planning

Autonomous cooperative planning (ACP) is a promising technique to improve the efficiency and safety of multi-vehicle interactions for future intelligent transportation systems. However, realizing robust ACP is a challenge due to the aggregation of perception, motion, and communication uncertainties. This paper proposes a novel multi-uncertainty aware ACP (MUACP) framework that simultaneously accounts for multiple types of uncertainties via regularized cooperative model predictive control (RC-MPC). The regularizers and constraints for perception, motion, and communication are constructed according to the confidence levels, weather conditions, and outage probabilities, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated in the Car Learning to Act (CARLA) simulation platform. Results demonstrate that the proposed MUACP efficiently performs cooperative formation in real time and outperforms other benchmark approaches in various scenarios under imperfect knowledge of the environment.

Three-Dimensional Vehicle Dynamics State Estimation for High-Speed Race Cars under varying Signal Quality

This work aims to present a three-dimensional vehicle dynamics state estimation under varying signal quality. Few researchers have investigated the impact of three-dimensional road geometries on the state estimation and, thus, neglect road inclination and banking. Especially considering high velocities and accelerations, the literature does not address these effects. Therefore, we compare two- and three-dimensional state estimation schemes to outline the impact of road geometries. We use an Extended Kalman Filter with a point-mass motion model and extend it by an additional formulation of reference angles. Furthermore, virtual velocity measurements significantly improve the estimation of road angles and the vehicle's side slip angle. We highlight the importance of steady estimations for vehicle motion control algorithms and demonstrate the challenges of degraded signal quality and Global Navigation Satellite System dropouts. The proposed adaptive covariance facilitates a smooth estimation and enables stable controller behavior. The developed state estimation has been deployed on a high-speed autonomous race car at various racetracks. Our findings indicate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art vehicle dynamics state estimators and an industry-grade Inertial Navigation System. Further studies are needed to investigate the performance under varying track conditions and on other vehicle types.

UruBots Autonomous Car Team Two: Team Description Paper for FIRA 2024

This paper proposes a mini autonomous car to be used by the team UruBots for the 2024 FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge. The vehicle is proposed focusing on a low cost and light weight setup. Powered by a Raspberry PI4 and with a total weight of 1.15 Kilograms, we show that our vehicle manages to race a track of approximately 13 meters in 11 seconds at the best evaluation that was carried out, with an average speed of 1.2m/s in average. That performance was achieved after training a convolutional neural network with 1500 samples for a total amount of 60 epochs. Overall, we believe that our vehicle are suited to perform at the FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge 2024, helping the development of the field of study and the category in the competition.

PECAN: Personalizing Robot Behaviors through a Learned Canonical Space

Robots should personalize how they perform tasks to match the needs of individual human users. Today's robot achieve this personalization by asking for the human's feedback in the task space. For example, an autonomous car might show the human two different ways to decelerate at stoplights, and ask the human which of these motions they prefer. This current approach to personalization is indirect: based on the behaviors the human selects (e.g., decelerating slowly), the robot tries to infer their underlying preference (e.g., defensive driving). By contrast, our paper develops a learning and interface-based approach that enables humans to directly indicate their desired style. We do this by learning an abstract, low-dimensional, and continuous canonical space from human demonstration data. Each point in the canonical space corresponds to a different style (e.g., defensive or aggressive driving), and users can directly personalize the robot's behavior by simply clicking on a point. Given the human's selection, the robot then decodes this canonical style across each task in the dataset -- e.g., if the human selects a defensive style, the autonomous car personalizes its behavior to drive defensively when decelerating, passing other cars, or merging onto highways. We refer to our resulting approach as PECAN: Personalizing Robot Behaviors through a Learned Canonical Space. Our simulations and user studies suggest that humans prefer using PECAN to directly personalize robot behavior (particularly when those users become familiar with PECAN), and that users find the learned canonical space to be intuitive and consistent. See videos here: https://youtu.be/wRJpyr23PKI

Analyzing the impact of semantic LoD3 building models on image-based vehicle localization

Numerous navigation applications rely on data from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), even though their accuracy is compromised in urban areas, posing a significant challenge, particularly for precise autonomous car localization. Extensive research has focused on enhancing localization accuracy by integrating various sensor types to address this issue. This paper introduces a novel approach for car localization, leveraging image features that correspond with highly detailed semantic 3D building models. The core concept involves augmenting positioning accuracy by incorporating prior geometric and semantic knowledge into calculations. The work assesses outcomes using Level of Detail 2 (LoD2) and Level of Detail 3 (LoD3) models, analyzing whether facade-enriched models yield superior accuracy. This comprehensive analysis encompasses diverse methods, including off-the-shelf feature matching and deep learning, facilitating thorough discussion. Our experiments corroborate that LoD3 enables detecting up to 69\% more features than using LoD2 models. We believe that this study will contribute to the research of enhancing positioning accuracy in GNSS-denied urban canyons. It also shows a practical application of under-explored LoD3 building models on map-based car positioning.

UruBots Autonomous Cars Team One Description Paper for FIRA 2024

This document presents the design of an autonomous car developed by the UruBots team for the 2024 FIRA Autonomous Cars Race Challenge. The project involves creating an RC-car sized electric vehicle capable of navigating race tracks with in an autonomous manner. It integrates mechanical and electronic systems alongside artificial intelligence based algorithms for the navigation and real-time decision-making. The core of our project include the utilization of an AI-based algorithm to learn information from a camera and act in the robot to perform the navigation. We show that by creating a dataset with more than five thousand samples and a five-layered CNN we managed to achieve promissing performance we our proposed hardware setup. Overall, this paper aims to demonstrate the autonomous capabilities of our car, highlighting its readiness for the 2024 FIRA challenge, helping to contribute to the field of autonomous vehicle research.

Winning Through Simplicity: Autonomous Car Design for Formula Student

This paper presents the design of an autonomous race car that is self-designed, self-developed, and self-built by the Elefant Racing team at the University of Bayreuth. The system is created to compete in the Formula Student Driverless competition. Its primary focus is on the Acceleration track, a straight 75-meter-long course, and the Skidpad track, which comprises two circles forming an eight. Additionally, it is experimentally capable of competing in the Autocross and Trackdrive events, which feature tracks with previously unknown straights and curves. The paper details the hardware, software and sensor setup employed during the 2020/2021 season. Despite being developed by a small team with limited computer science expertise, the design won the Formula Student East Engineering Design award. Emphasizing simplicity and efficiency, the team employed streamlined techniques to achieve their success.

Motion Forecasting in Continuous Driving

Motion forecasting for agents in autonomous driving is highly challenging due to the numerous possibilities for each agent's next action and their complex interactions in space and time. In real applications, motion forecasting takes place repeatedly and continuously as the self-driving car moves. However, existing forecasting methods typically process each driving scene within a certain range independently, totally ignoring the situational and contextual relationships between successive driving scenes. This significantly simplifies the forecasting task, making the solutions suboptimal and inefficient to use in practice. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel motion forecasting framework for continuous driving, named RealMotion. It comprises two integral streams both at the scene level: (1) The scene context stream progressively accumulates historical scene information until the present moment, capturing temporal interactive relationships among scene elements. (2) The agent trajectory stream optimizes current forecasting by sequentially relaying past predictions. Besides, a data reorganization strategy is introduced to narrow the gap between existing benchmarks and real-world applications, consistent with our network. These approaches enable exploiting more broadly the situational and progressive insights of dynamic motion across space and time. Extensive experiments on Argoverse series with different settings demonstrate that our RealMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance, along with the advantage of efficient real-world inference. The source code will be available at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/RealMotion.

Transforming In-Vehicle Network Intrusion Detection: VAE-based Knowledge Distillation Meets Explainable AI

In the evolving landscape of autonomous vehicles, ensuring robust in-vehicle network (IVN) security is paramount. This paper introduces an advanced intrusion detection system (IDS) called KD-XVAE that uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based knowledge distillation approach to enhance both performance and efficiency. Our model significantly reduces complexity, operating with just 1669 parameters and achieving an inference time of 0.3 ms per batch, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained automotive environments. Evaluations in the HCRL Car-Hacking dataset demonstrate exceptional capabilities, attaining perfect scores (Recall, Precision, F1 Score of 100%, and FNR of 0%) under multiple attack types, including DoS, Fuzzing, Gear Spoofing, and RPM Spoofing. Comparative analysis on the CICIoV2024 dataset further underscores its superiority over traditional machine learning models, achieving perfect detection metrics. We furthermore integrate Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to ensure transparency in the model's decisions. The VAE compresses the original feature space into a latent space, on which the distilled model is trained. SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations) values provide insights into the importance of each latent dimension, mapped back to original features for intuitive understanding. Our paper advances the field by integrating state-of-the-art techniques, addressing critical challenges in the deployment of efficient, trustworthy, and reliable IDSes for autonomous vehicles, ensuring enhanced protection against emerging cyber threats.