14,854 research outputs found
Learning to Fly by Crashing
How do you learn to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and avoid
obstacles? One approach is to use a small dataset collected by human experts:
however, high capacity learning algorithms tend to overfit when trained with
little data. An alternative is to use simulation. But the gap between
simulation and real world remains large especially for perception problems. The
reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes!
In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes
itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects: it
samples naive trajectories and crashes into random objects. We crash our drone
11,500 times to create one of the biggest UAV crash dataset. This dataset
captures the different ways in which a UAV can crash. We use all this negative
flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same
trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. We show
that this simple self-supervised model is quite effective in navigating the UAV
even in extremely cluttered environments with dynamic obstacles including
humans. For supplementary video see: https://youtu.be/u151hJaGKU
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
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
Beauty and the Beast: Optimal Methods Meet Learning for Drone Racing
Autonomous micro aerial vehicles still struggle with fast and agile
maneuvers, dynamic environments, imperfect sensing, and state estimation drift.
Autonomous drone racing brings these challenges to the fore. Human pilots can
fly a previously unseen track after a handful of practice runs. In contrast,
state-of-the-art autonomous navigation algorithms require either a precise
metric map of the environment or a large amount of training data collected in
the track of interest. To bridge this gap, we propose an approach that can fly
a new track in a previously unseen environment without a precise map or
expensive data collection. Our approach represents the global track layout with
coarse gate locations, which can be easily estimated from a single
demonstration flight. At test time, a convolutional network predicts the poses
of the closest gates along with their uncertainty. These predictions are
incorporated by an extended Kalman filter to maintain optimal
maximum-a-posteriori estimates of gate locations. This allows the framework to
cope with misleading high-variance estimates that could stem from poor
observability or lack of visible gates. Given the estimated gate poses, we use
model predictive control to quickly and accurately navigate through the track.
We conduct extensive experiments in the physical world, demonstrating agile and
robust flight through complex and diverse previously-unseen race tracks. The
presented approach was used to win the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race
Competition, outracing the second-placing team by a factor of two.Comment: 6 pages (+1 references
Decoupled Learning of Environment Characteristics for Safe Exploration
Reinforcement learning is a proven technique for an agent to learn a task.
However, when learning a task using reinforcement learning, the agent cannot
distinguish the characteristics of the environment from those of the task. This
makes it harder to transfer skills between tasks in the same environment.
Furthermore, this does not reduce risk when training for a new task. In this
paper, we introduce an approach to decouple the environment characteristics
from the task-specific ones, allowing an agent to develop a sense of survival.
We evaluate our approach in an environment where an agent must learn a sequence
of collection tasks, and show that decoupled learning allows for a safer
utilization of prior knowledge.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, ICML 2017 workshop on Reliable Machine Learning
in the Wil
DoShiCo Challenge: Domain Shift in Control Prediction
Training deep neural network policies end-to-end for real-world applications
so far requires big demonstration datasets in the real world or big sets
consisting of a large variety of realistic and closely related 3D CAD models.
These real or virtual data should, moreover, have very similar characteristics
to the conditions expected at test time. These stringent requirements and the
time consuming data collection processes that they entail, are currently the
most important impediment that keeps deep reinforcement learning from being
deployed in real-world applications. Therefore, in this work we advocate an
alternative approach, where instead of avoiding any domain shift by carefully
selecting the training data, the goal is to learn a policy that can cope with
it. To this end, we propose the DoShiCo challenge: to train a model in very
basic synthetic environments, far from realistic, in a way that it can be
applied in more realistic environments as well as take the control decisions on
real-world data. In particular, we focus on the task of collision avoidance for
drones. We created a set of simulated environments that can be used as
benchmark and implemented a baseline method, exploiting depth prediction as an
auxiliary task to help overcome the domain shift. Even though the policy is
trained in very basic environments, it can learn to fly without collisions in a
very different realistic simulated environment. Of course several benchmarks
for reinforcement learning already exist - but they never include a large
domain shift. On the other hand, several benchmarks in computer vision focus on
the domain shift, but they take the form of a static datasets instead of
simulated environments. In this work we claim that it is crucial to take the
two challenges together in one benchmark.Comment: Published at SIMPAR 2018. Please visit the paper webpage for more
information, a movie and code for reproducing results:
https://kkelchte.github.io/doshic
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
Vision and Learning for Deliberative Monocular Cluttered Flight
Cameras provide a rich source of information while being passive, cheap and
lightweight for small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work
we present the first implementation of receding horizon control, which is
widely used in ground vehicles, with monocular vision as the only sensing mode
for autonomous UAV flight in dense clutter. We make it feasible on UAVs via a
number of contributions: novel coupling of perception and control via relevant
and diverse, multiple interpretations of the scene around the robot, leveraging
recent advances in machine learning to showcase anytime budgeted cost-sensitive
feature selection, and fast non-linear regression for monocular depth
prediction. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our novel pipeline via
real world experiments of more than 2 kms through dense trees with a quadrotor
built from off-the-shelf parts. Moreover our pipeline is designed to combine
information from other modalities like stereo and lidar as well if available
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