RITA: Boost Autonomous Driving Simulators with Realistic Interactive Traffic Flow

High-quality traffic flow generation is the core module in building simulators for autonomous driving. However, the majority of available simulators are incapable of replicating traffic patterns that accurately reflect the various features of real-world data while also simulating human-like reactive responses to the tested autopilot driving strategies. Taking one step forward to addressing such a problem, we propose Realistic Interactive TrAffic flow (RITA) as an integrated component of existing driving simulators to provide high-quality traffic flow for the evaluation and optimization of the tested driving strategies. RITA is developed with consideration of three key features, i.e., fidelity, diversity, and controllability, and consists of two core modules called RITABackend and RITAKit. RITABackend is built to support vehicle-wise control and provide traffic generation models from real-world datasets, while RITAKit is developed with easy-to-use interfaces for controllable traffic generation via RITABackend. We demonstrate RITA's capacity to create diversified and high-fidelity traffic simulations in several highly interactive highway scenarios. The experimental findings demonstrate that our produced RITA traffic flows exhibit all three key features, hence enhancing the completeness of driving strategy evaluation. Moreover, we showcase the possibility for further improvement of baseline strategies through online fine-tuning with RITA traffic flows.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

From Model-Based to Data-Driven Simulation: Challenges and Trends in Autonomous Driving

Simulation is an integral part in the process of developing autonomous vehicles and advantageous for training, validation, and verification of driving functions. Even though simulations come with a series of benefits compared to real-world experiments, various challenges still prevent virtual testing from entirely replacing physical test-drives. Our work provides an overview of these challenges with regard to different aspects and types of simulation and subsumes current trends to overcome them. We cover aspects around perception-, behavior- and content-realism as well as general hurdles in the domain of simulation. Among others, we observe a trend of data-driven, generative approaches and high-fidelity data synthesis to increasingly replace model-based simulation.Comment: Ferdinand M\"utsch, Helen Gremmelmaier, and Nicolas Becker contributed equally. Accepted for publication at CVPR 2023 VCAD worksho

Benchmarking the Physical-world Adversarial Robustness of Vehicle Detection

Adversarial attacks in the physical world can harm the robustness of detection models. Evaluating the robustness of detection models in the physical world can be challenging due to the time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of many experiments. Thus, virtual simulation experiments can provide a solution to this challenge. However, there is no unified detection benchmark based on virtual simulation environment. To address this challenge, we proposed an instant-level data generation pipeline based on the CARLA simulator. Using this pipeline, we generated the DCI dataset and conducted extensive experiments on three detection models and three physical adversarial attacks. The dataset covers 7 continuous and 1 discrete scenes, with over 40 angles, 20 distances, and 20,000 positions. The results indicate that Yolo v6 had strongest resistance, with only a 6.59% average AP drop, and ASA was the most effective attack algorithm with a 14.51% average AP reduction, twice that of other algorithms. Static scenes had higher recognition AP, and results under different weather conditions were similar. Adversarial attack algorithm improvement may be approaching its 'limitation'.Comment: CVPR 2023 worksho

Sim2real and Digital Twins in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

Safety and cost are two important concerns for the development of autonomous driving technologies. From the academic research to commercial applications of autonomous driving vehicles, sufficient simulation and real world testing are required. In general, a large scale of testing in simulation environment is conducted and then the learned driving knowledge is transferred to the real world, so how to adapt driving knowledge learned in simulation to reality becomes a critical issue. However, the virtual simulation world differs from the real world in many aspects such as lighting, textures, vehicle dynamics, and agents' behaviors, etc., which makes it difficult to bridge the gap between the virtual and real worlds. This gap is commonly referred to as the reality gap (RG). In recent years, researchers have explored various approaches to address the reality gap issue, which can be broadly classified into two categories: transferring knowledge from simulation to reality (sim2real) and learning in digital twins (DTs). In this paper, we consider the solutions through the sim2real and DTs technologies, and review important applications and innovations in the field of autonomous driving. Meanwhile, we show the state-of-the-arts from the views of algorithms, models, and simulators, and elaborate the development process from sim2real to DTs. The presentation also illustrates the far-reaching effects of the development of sim2real and DTs in autonomous driving

V2XP-ASG: Generating Adversarial Scenes for Vehicle-to-Everything Perception

Recent advancements in Vehicle-to-Everything communication technology have enabled autonomous vehicles to share sensory information to obtain better perception performance. With the rapid growth of autonomous vehicles and intelligent infrastructure, the V2X perception systems will soon be deployed at scale, which raises a safety-critical question: \textit{how can we evaluate and improve its performance under challenging traffic scenarios before the real-world deployment?} Collecting diverse large-scale real-world test scenes seems to be the most straightforward solution, but it is expensive and time-consuming, and the collections can only cover limited scenarios. To this end, we propose the first open adversarial scene generator V2XP-ASG that can produce realistic, challenging scenes for modern LiDAR-based multi-agent perception systems. V2XP-ASG learns to construct an adversarial collaboration graph and simultaneously perturb multiple agents' poses in an adversarial and plausible manner. The experiments demonstrate that V2XP-ASG can effectively identify challenging scenes for a large range of V2X perception systems. Meanwhile, by training on the limited number of generated challenging scenes, the accuracy of V2X perception systems can be further improved by 12.3\% on challenging and 4\% on normal scenes. Our code will be released at https://github.com/XHwind/V2XP-ASG.Comment: ICRA 2023, see https://github.com/XHwind/V2XP-AS