Autonomous vehicles have been actively investigated over the past few decades. Several recent works show the potential of autonomous vehicles in urban environments with impressive experimental results. However, these works note that autonomous vehicles are still occasionally inferior to expert drivers in complex scenarios. Furthermore, they do not focus on the possibilities of autonomous driving transportation services in other areas beyond urban environments. This paper presents the research results and lessons learned from autonomous driving transportation services in airfield, crowded indoor, and urban environments. We discuss how we address several unique challenges in these diverse environments. We also offer an overview of remaining challenges that have not received much attention but must be addressed. This paper aims to share our unique experience to support researchers who are interested in exploring autonomous driving transportation services in various real-world environments.
Trajectory prediction is a cornerstone in autonomous driving (AD), playing a critical role in enabling vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in dynamic environments. To address this task, this paper presents a novel trajectory prediction model tailored for accuracy in the face of heterogeneous and uncertain traffic scenarios. At the heart of this model lies the Characterized Diffusion Module, an innovative module designed to simulate traffic scenarios with inherent uncertainty. This module enriches the predictive process by infusing it with detailed semantic information, thereby enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy. Complementing this, our Spatio-Temporal (ST) Interaction Module captures the nuanced effects of traffic scenarios on vehicle dynamics across both spatial and temporal dimensions with remarkable effectiveness. Demonstrated through exhaustive evaluations, our model sets a new standard in trajectory prediction, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), Highway Drone (HighD), and Macao Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) datasets across both short and extended temporal spans. This performance underscores the model's unparalleled adaptability and efficacy in navigating complex traffic scenarios, including highways, urban streets, and intersections.
Platooning of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) plays a vital role in modernizing highways, ushering in enhanced efficiency and safety. This paper explores the significance of platooning in smart highways, employing a coupled partial differential equation (PDE) and ordinary differential equation (ODE) model to elucidate the complex interaction between bulk traffic flow and CAV platoons. Our study focuses on developing a Dyna-style planning and learning framework tailored for platoon control, with a specific goal of reducing fuel consumption. By harnessing the coupled PDE-ODE model, we improve data efficiency in Dyna-style learning through virtual experiences. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our macroscopic model in modeling platoons within mixed-autonomy settings, demonstrating a notable $10.11\%$ reduction in vehicular fuel consumption compared to conventional approaches.
[Context and Motivation] Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now a cornerstone of requirements automation. One compelling factor behind the growing adoption of NLP in Requirements Engineering (RE) is the prevalent use of natural language (NL) for specifying requirements in industry. NLP techniques are commonly used for automatically classifying requirements, extracting important information, e.g., domain models and glossary terms, and performing quality assurance tasks, such as ambiguity handling and completeness checking. With so many different NLP solution strategies available and the possibility of applying machine learning alongside, it can be challenging to choose the right strategy for a specific RE task and to evaluate the resulting solution in an empirically rigorous manner. [Content] In this chapter, we present guidelines for the selection of NLP techniques as well as for their evaluation in the context of RE. In particular, we discuss how to choose among different strategies such as traditional NLP, feature-based machine learning, and language-model-based methods. [Contribution] Our ultimate hope for this chapter is to serve as a stepping stone, assisting newcomers to NLP4RE in quickly initiating themselves into the NLP technologies most pertinent to the RE field.
Adaptive Cruise Control ACC can change the speed of the ego vehicle to maintain a safe distance from the following vehicle automatically. The primary purpose of this research is to use cutting-edge computing approaches to locate and track vehicles in real time under various conditions to achieve a safe ACC. The paper examines the extension of ACC employing depth cameras and radar sensors within Autonomous Vehicles AVs to respond in real time by changing weather conditions using the Car Learning to Act CARLA simulation platform at noon. The ego vehicle controller's decision to accelerate or decelerate depends on the speed of the leading ahead vehicle and the safe distance from that vehicle. Simulation results show that a Proportional Integral Derivative PID control of autonomous vehicles using a depth camera and radar sensors reduces the speed of the leading vehicle and the ego vehicle when it rains. In addition, longer travel time was observed for both vehicles in rainy conditions than in dry conditions. Also, PID control prevents the leading vehicle from rear collisions
Connected cars are susceptible to cyberattacks. Security and safety of future vehicles highly depend on a holistic protection of automotive components, of which the time-sensitive backbone network takes a significant role. These onboard Time-Sensitive Networks (TSNs) require monitoring for safety and -- as versatile platforms to host Network Anomaly Detection Systems (NADSs) -- for security. Still a thorough evaluation of anomaly detection methods in the context of hard real-time operations, automotive protocol stacks, and domain specific attack vectors is missing along with appropriate input datasets. In this paper, we present an assessment framework that allows for reproducible, comparable, and rapid evaluation of detection algorithms. It is based on a simulation toolchain, which contributes configurable topologies, traffic streams, anomalies, attacks, and detectors. We demonstrate the assessment of NADSs in a comprehensive in-vehicular network with its communication flows, on which we model traffic anomalies. We evaluate exemplary detection mechanisms and reveal how the detection performance is influenced by different combinations of TSN traffic flows and anomaly types. Our approach translates to other real-time Ethernet domains, such as industrial facilities, airplanes, and UAVs.
Connected vehicles, facilitated by Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, play a key role in enhancing road safety and traffic efficiency. However, V2V communications primarily rely on wireless protocols, such as Wi-Fi, that require additional collision avoidance mechanisms to better ensure bounded latency and reliability in critical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the challenge of message collision in V2V platooning through a slotted-based solution inspired by Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), which is gaining momentum for in-vehicle networks. To this end, we present a controller, named TSNCtl, operating at the application level of the vehicular communications stack. TSNCtl employs a finite state machine (FSM) to manage platoon formation and slot-based scheduling for message dissemination. The reported evaluation results, based on the OMNeT++ simulation framework and INET library, demonstrate the effectiveness of TSNCtl in reducing packet collisions across various scenarios. Specifically, our experiments reveal a significant reduction in packet collisions compared to the CSMA-CA baseline used in traditional Wi-Fi-based protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11p): for instance, with slot lengths of 2 ms, our solution achieves an average collision rate under 1%, compared to up to 50% for the baseline case.
As the era of autonomous cyber-physical systems (ACPSs), such as unmanned aerial vehicles and self-driving cars, unfolds, the demand for robust testing methodologies is key to realizing the adoption of such systems in real-world scenarios. However, traditional software testing paradigms face unprecedented challenges in ensuring the safety and reliability of these systems. In response, this paper pioneers a strategic roadmap for simulation-based testing of ACPSs, specifically focusing on autonomous systems. Our paper discusses the relevant challenges and obstacles of ACPSs, focusing on test automation and quality assurance, hence advocating for tailored solutions to address the unique demands of autonomous systems. While providing concrete definitions of test cases within simulation environments, we also accentuate the need to create new benchmark assets and the development of automated tools tailored explicitly for autonomous systems in the software engineering community. This paper not only highlights the relevant, pressing issues the software engineering community should focus on (in terms of practices, expected automation, and paradigms), but it also outlines ways to tackle them. By outlining the various domains and challenges of simulation-based testing/development for ACPSs, we provide directions for future research efforts.
This study focuses on MEC-enhanced, vehicle-based crowdsensing systems that rely on devices installed on automobiles. We investigate an opportunistic communication paradigm in which devices can transmit measured data directly to a crowdsensing server over a 4G communication channel or to nearby devices or so-called Road Side Units positioned along the road via Wi-Fi. We tackle a new problem that is how to reduce the cost of 4G while preserving the latency. We propose an offloading strategy that combines a reinforcement learning technique known as Q-learning with Fuzzy logic to accomplish the purpose. Q-learning assists devices in learning to decide the communication channel. Meanwhile, Fuzzy logic is used to optimize the reward function in Q-learning. The experiment results show that our offloading method significantly cuts down around 30-40% of the 4G communication cost while keeping the latency of 99% packets below the required threshold.
Traditional trajectory planning methods for autonomous vehicles have several limitations. For example, heuristic and explicit simple rules limit generalizability and hinder complex motions. These limitations can be addressed using reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning. However, reinforcement learning suffers from unstable learning and existing reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning methods do not consider the uncertainties. Thus, this paper, proposes a reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning method for autonomous vehicles. The proposed method involves an iterative reward prediction approach that iteratively predicts expectations of future states. These predicted states are then used to forecast rewards and integrated into the learning process to enhance stability. Additionally, a method is proposed that utilizes uncertainty propagation to make the reinforcement learning agent aware of uncertainties.The proposed method was evaluated using the CARLA simulator. Compared to the baseline methods, the proposed method reduced the collision rate by 60.17%, and increased the average reward by 30.82 times. A video of the proposed method is available at //www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfDbaeLfcN4.
Since DARPA Grand Challenges (rural) in 2004/05 and Urban Challenges in 2007, autonomous driving has been the most active field of AI applications. Almost at the same time, deep learning has made breakthrough by several pioneers, three of them (also called fathers of deep learning), Hinton, Bengio and LeCun, won ACM Turin Award in 2019. This is a survey of autonomous driving technologies with deep learning methods. We investigate the major fields of self-driving systems, such as perception, mapping and localization, prediction, planning and control, simulation, V2X and safety etc. Due to the limited space, we focus the analysis on several key areas, i.e. 2D and 3D object detection in perception, depth estimation from cameras, multiple sensor fusion on the data, feature and task level respectively, behavior modelling and prediction of vehicle driving and pedestrian trajectories.