3,354 research outputs found
Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning
We present an end-to-end imitation learning system for agile, off-road
autonomous driving using only low-cost sensors. By imitating a model predictive
controller equipped with advanced sensors, we train a deep neural network
control policy to map raw, high-dimensional observations to continuous steering
and throttle commands. Compared with recent approaches to similar tasks, our
method requires neither state estimation nor on-the-fly planning to navigate
the vehicle. Our approach relies on, and experimentally validates, recent
imitation learning theory. Empirically, we show that policies trained with
online imitation learning overcome well-known challenges related to covariate
shift and generalize better than policies trained with batch imitation
learning. Built on these insights, our autonomous driving system demonstrates
successful high-speed off-road driving, matching the state-of-the-art
performance.Comment: 13 pages, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 201
A Benchmark Comparison of Imitation Learning-based Control Policies for Autonomous Racing
Autonomous racing with scaled race cars has gained increasing attention as an
effective approach for developing perception, planning and control algorithms
for safe autonomous driving at the limits of the vehicle's handling. To train
agile control policies for autonomous racing, learning-based approaches largely
utilize reinforcement learning, albeit with mixed results. In this study, we
benchmark a variety of imitation learning policies for racing vehicles that are
applied directly or for bootstrapping reinforcement learning both in simulation
and on scaled real-world environments. We show that interactive imitation
learning techniques outperform traditional imitation learning methods and can
greatly improve the performance of reinforcement learning policies by
bootstrapping thanks to its better sample efficiency. Our benchmarks provide a
foundation for future research on autonomous racing using Imitation Learning
and Reinforcement Learning
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
Visual attention prediction improves performance of autonomous drone racing agents
Humans race drones faster than neural networks trained for end-to-end autonomous flight. This may be related to the ability of human pilots to select task-relevant visual information effectively. This work investigates whether neural networks capable of imitating human eye gaze behavior and attention can improve neural networks’ performance for the challenging task of vision-based autonomous drone racing. We hypothesize that gaze-based attention prediction can be an efficient mechanism for visual information selection and decision making in a simulator-based drone racing task. We test this hypothesis using eye gaze and flight trajectory data from 18 human drone pilots to train a visual attention prediction model. We then use this visual attention prediction model to train an end-to-end controller for vision-based autonomous drone racing using imitation learning. We compare the drone racing performance of the attention-prediction controller to those using raw image inputs and image-based abstractions (i.e., feature tracks). Comparing success rates for completing a challenging race track by autonomous flight, our results show that the attention-prediction based controller (88% success rate) outperforms the RGB-image (61% success rate) and feature-tracks (55% success rate) controller baselines. Furthermore, visual attention-prediction and feature-track based models showed better generalization performance than image-based models when evaluated on hold-out reference trajectories. Our results demonstrate that human visual attention prediction improves the performance of autonomous vision-based drone racing agents and provides an essential step towards vision-based, fast, and agile autonomous flight that eventually can reach and even exceed human performances
- …