Deep Lidar CNN to Understand the Dynamics of Moving Vehicles

Perception technologies in Autonomous Driving are experiencing their golden age due to the advances in Deep Learning. Yet, most of these systems rely on the semantically rich information of RGB images. Deep Learning solutions applied to the data of other sensors typically mounted on autonomous cars (e.g. lidars or radars) are not explored much. In this paper we propose a novel solution to understand the dynamics of moving vehicles of the scene from only lidar information. The main challenge of this problem stems from the fact that we need to disambiguate the proprio-motion of the 'observer' vehicle from that of the external 'observed' vehicles. For this purpose, we devise a CNN architecture which at testing time is fed with pairs of consecutive lidar scans. However, in order to properly learn the parameters of this network, during training we introduce a series of so-called pretext tasks which also leverage on image data. These tasks include semantic information about vehicleness and a novel lidar-flow feature which combines standard image-based optical flow with lidar scans. We obtain very promising results and show that including distilled image information only during training, allows improving the inference results of the network at test time, even when image data is no longer used.Comment: Presented in IEEE ICRA 2018. IEEE Copyrights: Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses. (V2 just corrected comments on arxiv submission

Towards Visual Ego-motion Learning in Robots

Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform these tasks, in a minimally supervised setting, as they gain more experience. To this end, we propose a fully trainable solution to visual ego-motion estimation for varied camera optics. We propose a visual ego-motion learning architecture that maps observed optical flow vectors to an ego-motion density estimate via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). By modeling the architecture as a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE), our model is able to provide introspective reasoning and prediction for ego-motion induced scene-flow. Additionally, our proposed model is especially amenable to bootstrapped ego-motion learning in robots where the supervision in ego-motion estimation for a particular camera sensor can be obtained from standard navigation-based sensor fusion strategies (GPS/INS and wheel-odometry fusion). Through experiments, we show the utility of our proposed approach in enabling the concept of self-supervised learning for visual ego-motion estimation in autonomous robots.Comment: Conference paper; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2017, Vancouver CA; 8 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Performance Boundary Identification for the Evaluation of Automated Vehicles using Gaussian Process Classification

Safety is an essential aspect in the facilitation of automated vehicle deployment. Current testing practices are not enough, and going beyond them leads to infeasible testing requirements, such as needing to drive billions of kilometres on public roads. Automated vehicles are exposed to an indefinite number of scenarios. Handling of the most challenging scenarios should be tested, which leads to the question of how such corner cases can be determined. We propose an approach to identify the performance boundary, where these corner cases are located, using Gaussian Process Classification. We also demonstrate the classification on an exemplary traffic jam approach scenario, showing that it is feasible and would lead to more efficient testing practices.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted at 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference - ITSC 2019, Auckland, New Zealand, October 201