With the onset of Electric vehicles, and them becoming more and more popular, autonomous cars are the future in the travel/driving experience. The barrier to reaching level 5 autonomy is the difficulty in the collection of data that incorporates good driving habits and the lack thereof. The problem with current implementations of self-driving cars is the need for massively large datasets and the need to evaluate the driving in the dataset. We propose a system that requires no data for its training. An evolutionary model would have the capability to optimize itself towards the fitness function. We have implemented Neuroevolution, a form of genetic algorithm, to train/evolve self-driving cars in a simulated virtual environment with the help of Unreal Engine 4, which utilizes Nvidia's PhysX Physics Engine to portray real-world vehicle dynamics accurately. We were able to observe the serendipitous nature of evolution and have exploited it to reach our optimal solution. We also demonstrate the ease in generalizing attributes brought about by genetic algorithms and how they may be used as a boilerplate upon which other machine learning techniques may be used to improve the overall driving experience.
Development of the intelligent autonomous robot technology presupposes its anticipated beneficial effect on the individuals and societies. In the case of such disruptive emergent technology, not only questions of how to build, but also why to build and with what consequences are important. The field of ethics of intelligent autonomous robotic cars is a good example of research with actionable practical value, where a variety of stakeholders, including the legal system and other societal and governmental actors, as well as companies and businesses, collaborate bringing about shared view of ethics and societal aspects of technology. It could be used as a starting platform for the approaches to the development of intelligent autonomous robots in general, considering human-machine interfaces in different phases of the life cycle of technology - the development, implementation, testing, use and disposal. Drawing from our work on ethics of autonomous intelligent robocars, and the existing literature on ethics of robotics, our contribution consists of a set of values and ethical principles with identified challenges and proposed approaches for meeting them. This may help stakeholders in the field of intelligent autonomous robotics to connect ethical principles with their applications. Our recommendations of ethical requirements for autonomous cars can be used for other types of intelligent autonomous robots, with the caveat for social robots that require more research regarding interactions with the users. We emphasize that existing ethical frameworks need to be applied in a context-sensitive way, by assessments in interdisciplinary, multi-competent teams through multi-criteria analysis. Furthermore, we argue for the need of a continuous development of ethical principles, guidelines, and regulations, informed by the progress of technologies and involving relevant stakeholders.
The discussion between the automotive industry, governments, ethicists, policy makers and general public about autonomous cars' moral agency is widening, and therefore we see the need to bring more insight into what meta-factors might actually influence the outcomes of such discussions, surveys and plebiscites. In our study, we focus on the psychological (personality traits), practical (active driving experience), gender and rhetoric/framing factors that might impact and even determine respondents' a priori preferences of autonomous cars' operation. We conducted an online survey (N=430) to collect data that show that the third person scenario is less biased than the first person scenario when presenting ethical dilemma related to autonomous cars. According to our analysis, gender bias should be explored in more extensive future studies as well. We recommend any participatory technology assessment discourse to use the third person scenario and to direct attention to the way any autonomous car related debate is introduced, especially in terms of linguistic and communication aspects and gender.
Machine vision and image processing are often used with sensors for situation awareness in autonomous systems, from industrial robots to self-driving cars. The 3D depth sensors, such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), Radar, are great invention for autonomous systems. Due to the complexity of the setup, LiDAR may not be suitable for some operational environments, for example, a space environment. This study was motivated by a desire to get real-time volumetric and change information with multiple 2D cameras instead of a depth camera. Two cameras were used to measure the dimensions of a rectangular object in real-time. The R-C-P (row-column-pixel) method is developed using image processing and edge detection. In addition to the surface areas, the R-C-P method also detects discontinuous edges or volumes. Lastly, experimental work is presented for illustration of the R-C-P method, which provides the equations for calculating surface area dimensions. Using the equations with given distance information between the object and the camera, the vision system provides the dimensions of actual objects.
Autonomous cars are indispensable when humans go further down the hands-free route. Although existing literature highlights that the acceptance of the autonomous car will increase if it drives in a human-like manner, sparse research offers the naturalistic experience from a passenger's seat perspective to examine the human likeness of current autonomous cars. The present study tested whether the AI driver could create a human-like ride experience for passengers based on 69 participants' feedback in a real-road scenario. We designed a ride experience-based version of the non-verbal Turing test for automated driving. Participants rode in autonomous cars (driven by either human or AI drivers) as a passenger and judged whether the driver was human or AI. The AI driver failed to pass our test because passengers detected the AI driver above chance. In contrast, when the human driver drove the car, the passengers' judgement was around chance. We further investigated how human passengers ascribe humanness in our test. Based on Lewin's field theory, we advanced a computational model combining signal detection theory with pre-trained language models to predict passengers' humanness rating behaviour. We employed affective transition between pre-study baseline emotions and corresponding post-stage emotions as the signal strength of our model. Results showed that the passengers' ascription of humanness would increase with the greater affective transition. Our study suggested an important role of affective transition in passengers' ascription of humanness, which might become a future direction for autonomous driving.
In this paper, we present the USTC FLICAR Dataset, which is dedicated to the development of simultaneous localization and mapping and precise 3D reconstruction of the workspace for heavy-duty autonomous aerial work robots. In recent years, numerous public datasets have played significant roles in the advancement of autonomous cars and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, these two platforms differ from aerial work robots: UAVs are limited in their payload capacity, while cars are restricted to two-dimensional movements. To fill this gap, we create the Giraffe mapping robot based on a bucket truck, which is equipped with a variety of well-calibrated and synchronized sensors: four 3D LiDARs, two stereo cameras, two monocular cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), and a GNSS/INS system. A laser tracker is used to record the millimeter-level ground truth positions. We also make its ground twin, the Okapi mapping robot, to gather data for comparison. The proposed dataset extends the typical autonomous driving sensing suite to aerial scenes. Therefore, the dataset is named FLICAR to denote flying cars. We believe this dataset can also represent the flying car scenarios, specifically the takeoff and landing of VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) flying cars. The dataset is available for download at: https://ustc-flicar.github.io.
Real-world decision-making problems are often partially observable, and many can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). When we apply reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the POMDP, reasonable estimation of the hidden states can help solve the problems. Furthermore, explainable decision-making is preferable, considering their application to real-world tasks such as autonomous driving cars. We proposed an RL algorithm that estimates the hidden states by end-to-end training, and visualize the estimation as a state-transition graph. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can solve simple POMDP problems and that the visualization makes the agent's behavior interpretable to humans.
Object detection and segmentation are two core modules of an autonomous vehicle perception system. They should have high efficiency and low latency while reducing computational complexity. Currently, the most commonly used algorithms are based on deep neural networks, which guarantee high efficiency but require high-performance computing platforms. In the case of autonomous vehicles, i.e. cars, but also drones, it is necessary to use embedded platforms with limited computing power, which makes it difficult to meet the requirements described above. A reduction in the complexity of the network can be achieved by using an appropriate: architecture, representation (reduced numerical precision, quantisation, pruning), and computing platform. In this paper, we focus on the first factor - the use of so-called detection-segmentation networks as a component of a perception system. We considered the task of segmenting the drivable area and road markings in combination with the detection of selected objects (pedestrians, traffic lights, and obstacles). We compared the performance of three different architectures described in the literature: MultiTask V3, HybridNets, and YOLOP. We conducted the experiments on a custom dataset consisting of approximately 500 images of the drivable area and lane markings, and 250 images of detected objects. Of the three methods analysed, MultiTask V3 proved to be the best, achieving 99% mAP_50 for detection, 97% MIoU for drivable area segmentation, and 91% MIoU for lane segmentation, as well as 124 fps on the RTX 3060 graphics card. This architecture is a good solution for embedded perception systems for autonomous vehicles. The code is available at: https://github.com/vision-agh/MMAR_2023.
This paper describes the first open dataset for full-scale and high-speed autonomous racing. Multi-modal sensor data has been collected from fully autonomous Indy race cars operating at speeds of up to 170 mph (273 kph). Six teams who raced in the Indy Autonomous Challenge have contributed to this dataset. The dataset spans 11 interesting racing scenarios across two race tracks which include solo laps, multi-agent laps, overtaking situations, high-accelerations, banked tracks, obstacle avoidance, pit entry and exit at different speeds. The dataset contains data from 27 racing sessions across the 11 scenarios with over 6.5 hours of sensor data recorded from the track. The data is organized and released in both ROS2 and nuScenes format. We have also developed the ROS2-to-nuScenes conversion library to achieve this. The RACECAR data is unique because of the high-speed environment of autonomous racing. We present several benchmark problems on localization, object detection and tracking (LiDAR, Radar, and Camera), and mapping using the RACECAR data to explore issues that arise at the limits of operation of the vehicle.