An Evolutionary Tuned Driving System for Virtual Car Racing Games: The AUTOPIA Driver

International audienceThis work presents a driving system designed for virtual racing situations. It is based on a complete modular architecture capable of automatically driving a car along a track with or without opponents. The architecture is composed of intuitive modules, with each one being responsible for a basic aspect of car driving. Moreover, this modularity of the architecture will allow us to replace or add modules in the future as a way to enhance particular features of particular situations. In the present work, some of the modules are implemented by means of hand-designed driving heuristics, whereas modules responsible for adapting the speed and direction of the vehicle to the track's shape, both critical aspects of driving a vehicle, are optimized by means of a genetic algorithm that evaluates the performance of the controller in four different tracks to obtain the best controller in a large number of situations; the algorithm also penalizes controllers that go out of the track, lose control, or get damaged. The evaluation of the performance is done in two ways. First, in runs with and without adversaries over several tracks. And second, the architecture was submitted as a participant to the 2010 Simulated Car Racing Competition, which in end won laurels

An Autonomous Driver of a TORCS Racing Car

Tato práce popisuje simulátor TORCS a optimalizační algoritmy, jenž jsou využívány při tvorbě autonomních řidičů pro tento simulátor. Hlavním cílem je navržení nového autonomního řidiče, který se bude schopen s použitím přírodou inspirovaných optimalizačních technik vyrovnat již dříve navrženým řešením. Chování implementovaného řešení lze rozdělit do dvou hlavních částí, které jsou využívány v různých rozdílných etapách závodu. Zahřívací kolo je využito pro vytvoření modelu trati, ze kterého je posléze získána optimální trajektorie pomocí genetického algoritmu. Této trajektorie je potom využíváno v samotné kvalifikaci či závodě pro zajetí co nejrychlejšího kola. Z důvodu složitosti problému optimalizace celé trajektorie je nutno tuto trajektorii rozdělit na menší úseky nazývané segmenty, přičemž každý z nich je potom optimalizován odděleně. Jednotlivé optimalizované segmenty jsou následně spojeny dohromady, aby opět utvořily trajektorii pro celou trať. Protože některé přechody mezi segmenty mohou být nesouvislé, je zde znovu aplikován genetický algoritmus pro jejich vyhlazení. Během závodu je tato trajektorie následována, přičemž se z ní odvíjí i maximální možná rychlost v daném úseku. V práci jsme ukázali, že vzorkování trati s následnou optimalizací pomocí genetického algoritmu trvá pouze zlomek času vyhrazeného pro zahřívací kolo. Nejen díky tomuto se řešení jeví jako vhodné pro závody autonomních řidičů a může být dále rozšířeno.This work describes the TORCS simulator and optimization algorithms used in the field of autonomous driving competitions. The main purpose of this work is to design a new controller solution based on genetic algorithms. The controller's behavior can be divided into two main parts which are exploited during the distinct stages of the competition. The warm-up stage serves for the track model sampling and the race line optimization. The race stage logic then benefits from the data obtained in the warm-up stage. The track optimization is done by a Genetic algorithm while the track is divided into several segments optimized separately. A genetic algorithm is applied once again to the track trajectory to smooth out gaps caused by the segment composition. In this work was shown that the track sampling and race line optimization by a genetic algorithm can be done during the warm-up stage. This makes the controller suitable for an autonomous driver competitions.

Gene regulated car driving: using a gene regulatory network to drive a virtual car

This paper presents a virtual racing car controller based on an artificial gene regulatory network. Usually used to control virtual cells in developmental models, recent works showed that gene regulatory networks are also capable to control various kinds of agents such as foraging agents, pole cart, swarm robots, etc. This paper details how a gene regulatory network is evolved to drive on any track through a three-stages incremental evolution. To do so, the inputs and outputs of the network are directly mapped to the car sensors and actuators. To make this controller a competitive racer, we have distorted its inputs online to make it drive faster and to avoid opponents. Another interesting property emerges from this approach: the regulatory network is naturally resistant to noise. To evaluate this approach, we participated in the 2013 simulated racing car competition against eight other evolutionary and scripted approaches. After its first participation, this approach finished in third place in the competition

The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competitio

Context dependent fuzzy modelling and its applications

Fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBS) use the principle of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic to describe vague and imprecise statements and provide a facility to express the behaviours of the system with a human-understandable language. Fuzzy information, once defined by a fuzzy system, is fixed regardless of the circumstances and therefore makes it very difficult to capture the effect of context on the meaning of the fuzzy terms. While efforts have been made to integrate contextual information into the representation of fuzzy sets, it remains the case that often the context model is very restrictive and/or problem specific. The work reported in this thesis is our attempt to create a practical frame work to integrate contextual information into the representation of fuzzy sets so as to improve the interpretability as well as the accuracy of the fuzzy system. Throughout this thesis, we have looked at the capability of the proposed context dependent fuzzy sets as a stand alone as well as in combination with other methods in various application scenarios ranging from time series forecasting to complicated car racing control systems. In all of the applications, the highly competitive performance nature of our approach has proven its effectiveness and efficiency compared with existing techniques in the literature

Augmented Driver Behavior Models for High-Fidelity Simulation Study of Crash Detection Algorithms

Developing safety and efficiency applications for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) require a great deal of testing and evaluation. The need for the operation of these systems in critical and dangerous situations makes the burden of their evaluation very costly, possibly dangerous, and time-consuming. As an alternative, researchers attempt to study and evaluate their algorithms and designs using simulation platforms. Modeling the behavior of drivers or human operators in CAVs or other vehicles interacting with them is one of the main challenges of such simulations. While developing a perfect model for human behavior is a challenging task and an open problem, we present a significant augmentation of the current models used in simulators for driver behavior. In this paper, we present a simulation platform for a hybrid transportation system that includes both human-driven and automated vehicles. In addition, we decompose the human driving task and offer a modular approach to simulating a large-scale traffic scenario, allowing for a thorough investigation of automated and active safety systems. Such representation through Interconnected modules offers a human-interpretable system that can be tuned to represent different classes of drivers. Additionally, we analyze a large driving dataset to extract expressive parameters that would best describe different driving characteristics. Finally, we recreate a similarly dense traffic scenario within our simulator and conduct a thorough analysis of various human-specific and system-specific factors, studying their effect on traffic network performance and safety

Context dependent fuzzy modelling and its applications

Fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBS) use the principle of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic to describe vague and imprecise statements and provide a facility to express the behaviours of the system with a human-understandable language. Fuzzy information, once defined by a fuzzy system, is fixed regardless of the circumstances and therefore makes it very difficult to capture the effect of context on the meaning of the fuzzy terms. While efforts have been made to integrate contextual information into the representation of fuzzy sets, it remains the case that often the context model is very restrictive and/or problem specific. The work reported in this thesis is our attempt to create a practical frame work to integrate contextual information into the representation of fuzzy sets so as to improve the interpretability as well as the accuracy of the fuzzy system. Throughout this thesis, we have looked at the capability of the proposed context dependent fuzzy sets as a stand alone as well as in combination with other methods in various application scenarios ranging from time series forecasting to complicated car racing control systems. In all of the applications, the highly competitive performance nature of our approach has proven its effectiveness and efficiency compared with existing techniques in the literature