18,036 research outputs found
Towards Full Automated Drive in Urban Environments: A Demonstration in GoMentum Station, California
Each year, millions of motor vehicle traffic accidents all over the world
cause a large number of fatalities, injuries and significant material loss.
Automated Driving (AD) has potential to drastically reduce such accidents. In
this work, we focus on the technical challenges that arise from AD in urban
environments. We present the overall architecture of an AD system and describe
in detail the perception and planning modules. The AD system, built on a
modified Acura RLX, was demonstrated in a course in GoMentum Station in
California. We demonstrated autonomous handling of 4 scenarios: traffic lights,
cross-traffic at intersections, construction zones and pedestrians. The AD
vehicle displayed safe behavior and performed consistently in repeated
demonstrations with slight variations in conditions. Overall, we completed 44
runs, encompassing 110km of automated driving with only 3 cases where the
driver intervened the control of the vehicle, mostly due to error in GPS
positioning. Our demonstration showed that robust and consistent behavior in
urban scenarios is possible, yet more investigation is necessary for full scale
roll-out on public roads.Comment: Accepted to Intelligent Vehicles Conference (IV 2017
Drive Video Analysis for the Detection of Traffic Near-Miss Incidents
Because of their recent introduction, self-driving cars and advanced driver
assistance system (ADAS) equipped vehicles have had little opportunity to
learn, the dangerous traffic (including near-miss incident) scenarios that
provide normal drivers with strong motivation to drive safely. Accordingly, as
a means of providing learning depth, this paper presents a novel traffic
database that contains information on a large number of traffic near-miss
incidents that were obtained by mounting driving recorders in more than 100
taxis over the course of a decade. The study makes the following two main
contributions: (i) In order to assist automated systems in detecting near-miss
incidents based on database instances, we created a large-scale traffic
near-miss incident database (NIDB) that consists of video clip of dangerous
events captured by monocular driving recorders. (ii) To illustrate the
applicability of NIDB traffic near-miss incidents, we provide two primary
database-related improvements: parameter fine-tuning using various near-miss
scenes from NIDB, and foreground/background separation into motion
representation. Then, using our new database in conjunction with a monocular
driving recorder, we developed a near-miss recognition method that provides
automated systems with a performance level that is comparable to a human-level
understanding of near-miss incidents (64.5% vs. 68.4% at near-miss recognition,
61.3% vs. 78.7% at near-miss detection).Comment: Accepted to ICRA 201
A Learning-Based Framework for Two-Dimensional Vehicle Maneuver Prediction over V2V Networks
Situational awareness in vehicular networks could be substantially improved
utilizing reliable trajectory prediction methods. More precise situational
awareness, in turn, results in notably better performance of critical safety
applications, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), as well as comfort
applications like Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). Therefore,
vehicle trajectory prediction problem needs to be deeply investigated in order
to come up with an end to end framework with enough precision required by the
safety applications' controllers. This problem has been tackled in the
literature using different methods. However, machine learning, which is a
promising and emerging field with remarkable potential for time series
prediction, has not been explored enough for this purpose. In this paper, a
two-layer neural network-based system is developed which predicts the future
values of vehicle parameters, such as velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate, in
the first layer and then predicts the two-dimensional, i.e. longitudinal and
lateral, trajectory points based on the first layer's outputs. The performance
of the proposed framework has been evaluated in realistic cut-in scenarios from
Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) dataset and the results show a noticeable
improvement in the prediction accuracy in comparison with the kinematics model
which is the dominant employed model by the automotive industry. Both ideal and
nonideal communication circumstances have been investigated for our system
evaluation. For non-ideal case, an estimation step is included in the framework
before the parameter prediction block to handle the drawbacks of packet drops
or sensor failures and reconstruct the time series of vehicle parameters at a
desirable frequency
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Explainable and Advisable Learning for Self-driving Vehicles
Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers, etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Explanations may be triggered by the neural controller, namely introspective explanations, or informed by the neural controller's output, namely rationalizations. Our work has focused on the challenge of generating introspective explanations of deep models for self-driving vehicles. In Chapter 3, we begin by exploring the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). In the first stage, we use a visual attention model to train a convolution network end-to-end from images to steering angle. The attention model highlights image regions that potentially influence the network's output. Some of these are true influences, but some are spurious. We then apply a causal filtering step to determine which input regions actually influence the output. This produces more succinct visual explanations and more accurately exposes the network's behavior. In Chapter 4, we add an attention-based video-to-text model to produce textual explanations of model actions, e.g. "the car slows down because the road is wet". The attention maps of controller and explanation model are aligned so that explanations are grounded in the parts of the scene that mattered to the controller. We explore two approaches to attention alignment, strong- and weak-alignment. These explainable systems represent an externalization of tacit knowledge. The network's opaque reasoning is simplified to a situation-specific dependence on a visible object in the image. This makes them brittle and potentially unsafe in situations that do not match training data. In Chapter 5, we propose to address this issue by augmenting training data with natural language advice from a human. Advice includes guidance about what to do and where to attend. We present the first step toward advice-giving, where we train an end-to-end vehicle controller that accepts advice. The controller adapts the way it attends to the scene (visual attention) and the control (steering and speed). Further, in Chapter 6, we propose a new approach that learns vehicle control with the help of long-term (global) human advice. Specifically, our system learns to summarize its visual observations in natural language, predict an appropriate action response (e.g. "I see a pedestrian crossing, so I stop"), and predict the controls, accordingly
A Learning-based Stochastic MPC Design for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control to Handle Interfering Vehicles
Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication has a great potential to improve
reaction accuracy of different driver assistance systems in critical driving
situations. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), which is an automated
application, provides drivers with extra benefits such as traffic throughput
maximization and collision avoidance. CACC systems must be designed in a way
that are sufficiently robust against all special maneuvers such as cutting-into
the CACC platoons by interfering vehicles or hard braking by leading cars. To
address this problem, a Neural- Network (NN)-based cut-in detection and
trajectory prediction scheme is proposed in the first part of this paper. Next,
a probabilistic framework is developed in which the cut-in probability is
calculated based on the output of the mentioned cut-in prediction block.
Finally, a specific Stochastic Model Predictive Controller (SMPC) is designed
which incorporates this cut-in probability to enhance its reaction against the
detected dangerous cut-in maneuver. The overall system is implemented and its
performance is evaluated using realistic driving scenarios from Safety Pilot
Model Deployment (SPMD).Comment: 10 pages, Submitted as a journal paper at T-I
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