1,401 research outputs found
Enhancing State Estimator for Autonomous Race Car : Leveraging Multi-modal System and Managing Computing Resources
This paper introduces an innovative approach to enhance the state estimator
for high-speed autonomous race cars, addressing challenges related to
unreliable measurements, localization failures, and computing resource
management. The proposed robust localization system utilizes a Bayesian-based
probabilistic approach to evaluate multimodal measurements, ensuring the use of
credible data for accurate and reliable localization, even in harsh racing
conditions. To tackle potential localization failures during intense racing, we
present a resilient navigation system. This system enables the race car to
continue track-following by leveraging direct perception information in
planning and execution, ensuring continuous performance despite localization
disruptions. Efficient computing resource management is critical to avoid
overload and system failure. We optimize computing resources using an efficient
LiDAR-based state estimation method. Leveraging CUDA programming and GPU
acceleration, we perform nearest points search and covariance computation
efficiently, overcoming CPU bottlenecks. Real-world and simulation tests
validate the system's performance and resilience. The proposed approach
successfully recovers from failures, effectively preventing accidents and
ensuring race car safety.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.1223
VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases
Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve
free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an
effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed
in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication
capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices.
Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of
transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not
only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user
extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and
specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the
emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this
evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are
adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric
view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of
emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We
identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car:
paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through
different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of
the user within an intelligent and efficient driving
Reducing DNN Labelling Cost using Surprise Adequacy: An Industrial Case Study for Autonomous Driving
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are rapidly being adopted by the automotive
industry, due to their impressive performance in tasks that are essential for
autonomous driving. Object segmentation is one such task: its aim is to
precisely locate boundaries of objects and classify the identified objects,
helping autonomous cars to recognise the road environment and the traffic
situation. Not only is this task safety critical, but developing a DNN based
object segmentation module presents a set of challenges that are significantly
different from traditional development of safety critical software. The
development process in use consists of multiple iterations of data collection,
labelling, training, and evaluation. Among these stages, training and
evaluation are computation intensive while data collection and labelling are
manual labour intensive. This paper shows how development of DNN based object
segmentation can be improved by exploiting the correlation between Surprise
Adequacy (SA) and model performance. The correlation allows us to predict model
performance for inputs without manually labelling them. This, in turn, enables
understanding of model performance, more guided data collection, and informed
decisions about further training. In our industrial case study the technique
allows cost savings of up to 50% with negligible evaluation inaccuracy.
Furthermore, engineers can trade off cost savings versus the tolerable level of
inaccuracy depending on different development phases and scenarios.Comment: to be published in Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European
Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software
Engineerin
Moonshots
In the last half-century, technological progress has stagnated. Rapid advances in information technology disguise the slow pace of productivity growth in other fields. Reigniting technological progress may require firms to invest in moonshots—long-term projects to commercialize innovations. Yet all but a few giant tech firms shy away from moonshots, even when the expected returns would justify the investment. The root of the problem is corporate structure. The process of developing a novel technology does not generate the kind of interim feedback that shareholders need to monitor managers and managers need to motivate employees. Managers who anticipate these agency problems invest in incremental innovations instead.
In the last few years, a new structure designed to commercialize long-term innovations has emerged—the venture carveout. A venture carveout is a private company with one or two public company parents, outside private investors, and employee ownership. The parents provide intellectual property and a long-term strategic commitment. The private investors supply patient capital that insulates the project from short-term shareholder pressure. The employees’ equity motivates them to bring a product to market. The first venture carveouts are attempting to commercialize autonomous vehicles. If they succeed, they will validate a new model for innovation. This Article argues that venture carveouts could enable more companies to invest in moonshots, compete with the tech giants that dominate our economy, and accelerate technological progress
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Explainable and Advisable Learning for Self-driving Vehicles
Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers, etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Explanations may be triggered by the neural controller, namely introspective explanations, or informed by the neural controller's output, namely rationalizations. Our work has focused on the challenge of generating introspective explanations of deep models for self-driving vehicles. In Chapter 3, we begin by exploring the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). In the first stage, we use a visual attention model to train a convolution network end-to-end from images to steering angle. The attention model highlights image regions that potentially influence the network's output. Some of these are true influences, but some are spurious. We then apply a causal filtering step to determine which input regions actually influence the output. This produces more succinct visual explanations and more accurately exposes the network's behavior. In Chapter 4, we add an attention-based video-to-text model to produce textual explanations of model actions, e.g. "the car slows down because the road is wet". The attention maps of controller and explanation model are aligned so that explanations are grounded in the parts of the scene that mattered to the controller. We explore two approaches to attention alignment, strong- and weak-alignment. These explainable systems represent an externalization of tacit knowledge. The network's opaque reasoning is simplified to a situation-specific dependence on a visible object in the image. This makes them brittle and potentially unsafe in situations that do not match training data. In Chapter 5, we propose to address this issue by augmenting training data with natural language advice from a human. Advice includes guidance about what to do and where to attend. We present the first step toward advice-giving, where we train an end-to-end vehicle controller that accepts advice. The controller adapts the way it attends to the scene (visual attention) and the control (steering and speed). Further, in Chapter 6, we propose a new approach that learns vehicle control with the help of long-term (global) human advice. Specifically, our system learns to summarize its visual observations in natural language, predict an appropriate action response (e.g. "I see a pedestrian crossing, so I stop"), and predict the controls, accordingly
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