While the majority of autonomous driving research has concentrated on everyday driving scenarios, further safety and performance improvements of autonomous vehicles require a focus on extreme driving conditions. In this context, autonomous racing is a new area of research that has been attracting considerable interest recently. Due to the fact that a vehicle is driven by its perception, planning, and control limits during racing, numerous research and development issues arise. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the autonomous racing system built by team KAIST for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). Our autonomy stack consists primarily of a multi-modal perception module, a high-speed overtaking planner, a resilient control stack, and a system status manager. We present the details of all components of our autonomy solution, including algorithms, implementation, and unit test results. In addition, this paper outlines the design principles and the results of a systematical analysis. Even though our design principles are derived from the unique application domain of autonomous racing, they can also be applied to a variety of safety-critical, high-cost-of-failure robotics applications. The proposed system was integrated into a full-scale autonomous race car (Dallara AV-21) and field-tested extensively. As a result, team KAIST was one of three teams who qualified and participated in the official IAC race events without any accidents. Our proposed autonomous system successfully completed all missions, including overtaking at speeds of around $220 km/h$ in the IAC@CES2022, the world's first autonomous 1:1 head-to-head race.
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) techniques have recently yielded promising results for real-world autonomous racing using high-dimensional observations. MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, solve long-horizon tasks by building a world model and planning actions by latent imagination. This approach involves explicitly learning a model of the system dynamics and using it to learn the optimal policy for continuous control over multiple timesteps. As a result, MBRL agents may converge to sub-optimal policies if the world model is inaccurate. To improve state estimation for autonomous racing, this paper proposes a self-supervised sensor fusion technique that combines egocentric LiDAR and RGB camera observations collected from the F1TENTH Gym. The zero-shot performance of MBRL agents is empirically evaluated on unseen tracks and against a dynamic obstacle. This paper illustrates that multimodal perception improves robustness of the world model without requiring additional training data. The resulting multimodal Dreamer agent safely avoided collisions and won the most races compared to other tested baselines in zero-shot head-to-head autonomous racing.
An autonomous service robot should be able to interact with its environment safely and robustly without requiring human assistance. Unstructured environments are challenging for robots since the exact prediction of outcomes is not always possible. Even when the robot behaviors are well-designed, the unpredictable nature of physical robot-object interaction may prevent success in object manipulation. Therefore, execution of a manipulation action may result in an undesirable outcome involving accidents or damages to the objects or environment. Situation awareness becomes important in such cases to enable the robot to (i) maintain the integrity of both itself and the environment, (ii) recover from failed tasks in the short term, and (iii) learn to avoid failures in the long term. For this purpose, robot executions should be continuously monitored, and failures should be detected and classified appropriately. In this work, we focus on detecting and classifying both manipulation and post-manipulation phase failures using the same exteroception setup. We cover a diverse set of failure types for primary tabletop manipulation actions. In order to detect these failures, we propose FINO-Net [1], a deep multimodal sensor fusion based classifier network. Proposed network accurately detects and classifies failures from raw sensory data without any prior knowledge. In this work, we use our extended FAILURE dataset [1] with 99 new multimodal manipulation recordings and annotate them with their corresponding failure types. FINO-Net achieves 0.87 failure detection and 0.80 failure classification F1 scores. Experimental results show that proposed architecture is also appropriate for real-time use.
Pick-and-place robots are commonly used in modern industrial manufacturing. For complex devices/parts like camera modules used in smartphones, which contain optical parts, electrical components and interfacing connectors, the placement operation may not absolutely accurate, which may cause damage in the device under test during the mechanical movement to make good contact for electrical functions inspection. In this paper, we proposed an effective vision system including hardware and algorithm to enhance the reliability of the pick-and-place robot for autonomous testing memory of camera modules. With limited hardware based on camera and raspberry PI and using simplify image processing algorithm based on histogram information, the vision system can confirm the presence of the camera modules in feeding tray and the placement accuracy of the camera module in test socket. Through that, the system can work with more flexibility and avoid damaging the device under test. The system was experimentally quantified through testing approximately 2000 camera modules in a stable light condition. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves accuracy of more than 99.92%. With its simplicity and effectiveness, the proposed vision system can be considered as a useful solution for using in pick-and-place systems in industry.
Autonomous exploration is a new technology in the field of robotics that has found widespread application due to its objective to help robots independently localize, scan maps, and navigate any terrain without human control. Up to present, the sampling-based exploration strategies have been the most effective for aerial and ground vehicles equipped with depth sensors producing three-dimensional point clouds. Those methods utilize the sampling task to choose random points or make samples based on Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT). Then, they decide on frontiers or Next Best Views (NBV) with useful volumetric information. However, most state-of-the-art sampling-based methodology is challenging to implement in two-dimensional robots due to the lack of environmental knowledge, thus resulting in a bad volumetric gain for evaluating random destinations. This study proposed an enhanced sampling-based solution for indoor robot exploration to decide Next Best View (NBV) in 2D environments. Our method makes RRT until have the endpoints as frontiers and evaluates those with the enhanced utility function. The volumetric information obtained from environments was estimated using non-uniform distribution to determine cells that are occupied and have an uncertain probability. Compared to the sampling-based Frontier Detection and Receding Horizon NBV approaches, the methodology executed performed better in Gazebo platform-simulated environments, achieving a significantly larger explored area, with the average distance and time traveled being reduced. Moreover, the operated proposed method on an author-built 2D robot exploring the entire natural environment confirms that the method is effective and applicable in real-world scenarios.
The full deployment of autonomous driving systems on a worldwide scale requires that the self-driving vehicle be operated in a provably safe manner, i.e., the vehicle must be able to avoid collisions in any possible traffic situation. In this paper, we propose a framework based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) that endows the self-driving vehicle with the necessary safety guarantees. In particular, our framework ensures constraint satisfaction at all times, while tracking the reference trajectory as close as obstacles allow, resulting in a safe and comfortable driving behavior. To discuss the performance and real-time capability of our framework, we provide first an illustrative simulation example, and then we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in experiments with a real test vehicle.
Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms which can operate drones in complex and uncertain environments. Additionally, flying fast enables drones to cover more ground which in turn increases productivity and further strengthens their use case. One proxy for developing algorithms used in high-speed navigation is the task of autonomous drone racing, where researchers program drones to fly through a sequence of gates and avoid obstacles as quickly as possible using onboard sensors and limited computational power. Speeds and accelerations exceed over 80 kph and 4 g respectively, raising significant challenges across perception, planning, control, and state estimation. To achieve maximum performance, systems require real-time algorithms that are robust to motion blur, high dynamic range, model uncertainties, aerodynamic disturbances, and often unpredictable opponents. This survey covers the progression of autonomous drone racing across model-based and learning-based approaches. We provide an overview of the field, its evolution over the years, and conclude with the biggest challenges and open questions to be faced in the future.
Computing is a critical driving force in the development of human civilization. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of intelligent computing, a new computing paradigm that is reshaping traditional computing and promoting digital revolution in the era of big data, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things with new computing theories, architectures, methods, systems, and applications. Intelligent computing has greatly broadened the scope of computing, extending it from traditional computing on data to increasingly diverse computing paradigms such as perceptual intelligence, cognitive intelligence, autonomous intelligence, and human-computer fusion intelligence. Intelligence and computing have undergone paths of different evolution and development for a long time but have become increasingly intertwined in recent years: intelligent computing is not only intelligence-oriented but also intelligence-driven. Such cross-fertilization has prompted the emergence and rapid advancement of intelligent computing. Intelligent computing is still in its infancy and an abundance of innovations in the theories, systems, and applications of intelligent computing are expected to occur soon. We present the first comprehensive survey of literature on intelligent computing, covering its theory fundamentals, the technological fusion of intelligence and computing, important applications, challenges, and future perspectives. We believe that this survey is highly timely and will provide a comprehensive reference and cast valuable insights into intelligent computing for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners.
Automated Driving Systems (ADS) have made great achievements in recent years thanks to the efforts from both academia and industry. A typical ADS is composed of multiple modules, including sensing, perception, planning and control, which brings together the latest advances in multiple domains. Despite these achievements, safety assurance of the systems is still of great significance, since the unsafe behavior of ADS can bring catastrophic consequences and unacceptable economic and social losses. Testing is an important approach to system validation for the deployment in practice; in the context of ADS, it is extremely challenging, due to the system complexity and multidisciplinarity. There has been a great deal of literature that focuses on the testing of ADS, and a number of surveys have also emerged to summarize the technical advances. However, most of these surveys focus on the system-level testing that is performed within software simulators, and thereby ignore the distinct features of individual modules. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the existing ADS testing literature, which takes into account both module-level and system-level testing. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (1) we build a threat model that reveals the potential safety threats for each module of an ADS; (2) we survey the module-level testing techniques for ADS and highlight the technical differences affected by the properties of the modules; (3) we also survey the system-level testing techniques, but we focus on empirical studies that take a bird's-eye view on the system, the problems due to the collaborations between modules, and the gaps between ADS testing in simulators and real world; (4) we identify the challenges and opportunities in ADS testing, which facilitates the future research in this field.
When is heterogeneity in the composition of an autonomous robotic team beneficial and when is it detrimental? We investigate and answer this question in the context of a minimally viable model that examines the role of heterogeneous speeds in perimeter defense problems, where defenders share a total allocated speed budget. We consider two distinct problem settings and develop strategies based on dynamic programming and on local interaction rules. We present a theoretical analysis of both approaches and our results are extensively validated using simulations. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the viability of heterogeneous teams depends on the amount of information available to the defenders. Moreover, our results suggest a universality property: across a wide range of problem parameters the optimal ratio of the speeds of the defenders remains nearly constant.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.