Safe Guaranteed Exploration for Non-linear Systems

Safely exploring environments with a-priori unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge that restricts the autonomy of robots. While safety is paramount, guarantees on sufficient exploration are also crucial for ensuring autonomous task completion. To address these challenges, we propose a novel safe guaranteed exploration framework using optimal control, which achieves first-of-its-kind results: guaranteed exploration for non-linear systems with finite time sample complexity bounds, while being provably safe with arbitrarily high probability. The framework is general and applicable to many real-world scenarios with complex non-linear dynamics and unknown domains. Based on this framework we propose an efficient algorithm, SageMPC, SAfe Guaranteed Exploration using Model Predictive Control. SageMPC improves efficiency by incorporating three techniques: i) exploiting a Lipschitz bound, ii) goal-directed exploration, and iii) receding horizon style re-planning, all while maintaining the desired sample complexity, safety and exploration guarantees of the framework. Lastly, we demonstrate safe efficient exploration in challenging unknown environments using SageMPC with a car model.

Introduction to Latent Variable Energy-Based Models: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence

Current automated systems have crucial limitations that need to be addressed before artificial intelligence can reach human-like levels and bring new technological revolutions. Among others, our societies still lack Level 5 self-driving cars, domestic robots, and virtual assistants that learn reliable world models, reason, and plan complex action sequences. In these notes, we summarize the main ideas behind the architecture of autonomous intelligence of the future proposed by Yann LeCun. In particular, we introduce energy-based and latent variable models and combine their advantages in the building block of LeCun's proposal, that is, in the hierarchical joint embedding predictive architecture (H-JEPA).

Towards Robust Velocity and Position Estimation of Opponents for Autonomous Racing Using Low-Power Radar

This paper presents the design and development of an intelligent subsystem that includes a novel low-power radar sensor integrated into an autonomous racing perception pipeline to robustly estimate the position and velocity of dynamic obstacles. The proposed system, based on the Infineon BGT60TR13D radar, is evaluated in a real-world scenario with scaled race cars. The paper explores the benefits and limitations of using such a sensor subsystem and draws conclusions based on field-collected data. The results demonstrate a tracking error up to 0.21 +- 0.29 m in distance estimation and 0.39 +- 0.19 m/s in velocity estimation, despite the power consumption in the range of 10s of milliwatts. The presented system provides complementary information to other sensors such as LiDAR and camera, and can be used in a wide range of applications beyond autonomous racing.

OpenNet: Incremental Learning for Autonomous Driving Object Detection with Balanced Loss

Automated driving object detection has always been a challenging task in computer vision due to environmental uncertainties. These uncertainties include significant differences in object sizes and encountering the class unseen. It may result in poor performance when traditional object detection models are directly applied to automated driving detection. Because they usually presume fixed categories of common traffic participants, such as pedestrians and cars. Worsely, the huge class imbalance between common and novel classes further exacerbates performance degradation. To address the issues stated, we propose OpenNet to moderate the class imbalance with the Balanced Loss, which is based on Cross Entropy Loss. Besides, we adopt an inductive layer based on gradient reshaping to fast learn new classes with limited samples during incremental learning. To against catastrophic forgetting, we employ normalized feature distillation. By the way, we improve multi-scale detection robustness and unknown class recognition through FPN and energy-based detection, respectively. The Experimental results upon the CODA dataset show that the proposed method can obtain better performance than that of the existing methods.

Spatial Intelligence of a Self-driving Car and Rule-Based Decision Making

In this paper we show how rule-based decision making can be combined with traditional motion planning techniques to achieve human-like behavior of a self-driving vehicle in complex traffic situations. We give and discuss examples of decision rules in autonomous driving. We draw on these examples to illustrate that developing techniques for spatial awareness of robots is an exciting activity which deserves more attention from spatial reasoning community that it had received so far.

Model Predictive Contouring Control for Collision Avoidance in Unstructured Dynamic Environments

This paper presents a method for local motion planning in unstructured environments with static and moving obstacles, such as humans. Given a reference path and speed, our optimization-based receding-horizon approach computes a local trajectory that minimizes the tracking error while avoiding obstacles. We build on nonlinear model-predictive contouring control (MPCC) and extend it to incorporate a static map by computing, online, a set of convex regions in free space. We model moving obstacles as ellipsoids and provide a correct bound to approximate the collision region, given by the Minkowsky sum of an ellipse and a circle. Our framework is agnostic to the robot model. We present experimental results with a mobile robot navigating in indoor environments populated with humans. Our method is executed fully onboard without the need of external support and can be applied to other robot morphologies such as autonomous cars.

Occlusion-aware Risk Assessment and Driving Strategy for Autonomous Vehicles Using Simplified Reachability Quantification

There are several unresolved challenges for autonomous vehicles. One of them is safely navigating among occluded pedestrians and vehicles. Much of the previous work tried to solve this problem by generating phantom cars and assessing their risk. In this paper, motivated by the previous works, we propose an algorithm that efficiently assesses risks of phantom pedestrians/vehicles using Simplified Reachability Quantification. We utilized this occlusion risk to set a speed limit at the risky position when planning the velocity profile of an autonomous vehicle. This allows an autonomous vehicle to safely and efficiently drive in occluded areas. The proposed algorithm was evaluated in various scenarios in the CARLA simulator and it reduced the average collision rate by 6.14X, the discomfort score by 5.03X, while traversal time was increased by 1.48X compared to baseline 1, and computation time was reduced by 20.15X compared to baseline 2.

End-to-end Lidar-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Racing

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach in the domains of automation and robotics, offering powerful solutions to complex problems that conventional methods struggle to address. In scenarios where the problem definitions are elusive and challenging to quantify, learning-based solutions such as RL become particularly valuable. One instance of such complexity can be found in the realm of car racing, a dynamic and unpredictable environment that demands sophisticated decision-making algorithms. This study focuses on developing and training an RL agent to navigate a racing environment solely using feedforward raw lidar and velocity data in a simulated context. The agent's performance, trained in the simulation environment, is then experimentally evaluated in a real-world racing scenario. This exploration underlines the feasibility and potential benefits of RL algorithm enhancing autonomous racing performance, especially in the environments where prior map information is not available.

TWICE Dataset: Digital Twin of Test Scenarios in a Controlled Environment

Ensuring the safe and reliable operation of autonomous vehicles under adverse weather remains a significant challenge. To address this, we have developed a comprehensive dataset composed of sensor data acquired in a real test track and reproduced in the laboratory for the same test scenarios. The provided dataset includes camera, radar, LiDAR, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and GPS data recorded under adverse weather conditions (rainy, night-time, and snowy conditions). We recorded test scenarios using objects of interest such as car, cyclist, truck and pedestrian -- some of which are inspired by EURONCAP (European New Car Assessment Programme). The sensor data generated in the laboratory is acquired by the execution of simulation-based tests in hardware-in-the-loop environment with the digital twin of each real test scenario. The dataset contains more than 2 hours of recording, which totals more than 280GB of data. Therefore, it is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of autonomous vehicles to test and improve their algorithms in adverse weather conditions, as well as explore the simulation-to-reality gap. The dataset is available for download at: https://twicedataset.github.io/site/

OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving

Understanding how the 3D scene evolves is vital for making decisions in autonomous driving. Most existing methods achieve this by predicting the movements of object boxes, which cannot capture more fine-grained scene information. In this paper, we explore a new framework of learning a world model, OccWorld, in the 3D Occupancy space to simultaneously predict the movement of the ego car and the evolution of the surrounding scenes. We propose to learn a world model based on 3D occupancy rather than 3D bounding boxes and segmentation maps for three reasons: 1) expressiveness. 3D occupancy can describe the more fine-grained 3D structure of the scene; 2) efficiency. 3D occupancy is more economical to obtain (e.g., from sparse LiDAR points). 3) versatility. 3D occupancy can adapt to both vision and LiDAR. To facilitate the modeling of the world evolution, we learn a reconstruction-based scene tokenizer on the 3D occupancy to obtain discrete scene tokens to describe the surrounding scenes. We then adopt a GPT-like spatial-temporal generative transformer to generate subsequent scene and ego tokens to decode the future occupancy and ego trajectory. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes benchmark demonstrate the ability of OccWorld to effectively model the evolution of the driving scenes. OccWorld also produces competitive planning results without using instance and map supervision. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/OccWorld.