With the advancement of affordable self-driving vehicles using complicated nonlinear optimization but limited computation resources, computation time becomes a matter of concern. Other factors such as actuator dynamics and actuator command processing cost also unavoidably cause delays. In high-speed scenarios, these delays are critical to the safety of a vehicle. Recent works consider these delays individually, but none unifies them all in the context of autonomous driving. Moreover, recent works inappropriately consider computation time as a constant or a large upper bound, which makes the control either less responsive or over-conservative. To deal with all these delays, we present a unified framework by 1) modeling actuation dynamics, 2) using robust tube model predictive control, 3) using a novel adaptive Kalman filter without assuminga known process model and noise covariance, which makes the controller safe while minimizing conservativeness. On onehand, our approach can serve as a standalone controller; on theother hand, our approach provides a safety guard for a high-level controller, which assumes no delay. This can be used for compensating the sim-to-real gap when deploying a black-box learning-enabled controller trained in a simplistic environment without considering delays for practical vehicle systems.
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest environment. Strategies for mapping, localization, planning, and control are proposed and integrated into a fully autonomous system. The mission starts with a human mapping the area of interest using a custom-made sensor module. Subsequently, a human expert selects the trees for harvesting. The sensor module is then mounted on the machine and used for localization within the given map. A planning algorithm searches for both an approach pose and a path in a single path planning problem. We design a path following controller leveraging the legged harvester's capabilities for negotiating rough terrain. Upon reaching the approach pose, the machine grabs a tree with a general-purpose gripper. This process repeats for all the trees selected by the operator. Our system has been tested on a testing field with tree trunks and in a natural forest. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this level of autonomy has been shown on a full-size hydraulic machine operating in a realistic environment.
We investigate the adversarial robustness of streaming algorithms. In this context, an algorithm is considered robust if its performance guarantees hold even if the stream is chosen adaptively by an adversary that observes the outputs of the algorithm along the stream and can react in an online manner. While deterministic streaming algorithms are inherently robust, many central problems in the streaming literature do not admit sublinear-space deterministic algorithms; on the other hand, classical space-efficient randomized algorithms for these problems are generally not adversarially robust. This raises the natural question of whether there exist efficient adversarially robust (randomized) streaming algorithms for these problems. In this work, we show that the answer is positive for various important streaming problems in the insertion-only model, including distinct elements and more generally $F_p$-estimation, $F_p$-heavy hitters, entropy estimation, and others. For all of these problems, we develop adversarially robust $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms whose required space matches that of the best known non-robust algorithms up to a $\text{poly}(\log n, 1/\varepsilon)$ multiplicative factor (and in some cases even up to a constant factor). Towards this end, we develop several generic tools allowing one to efficiently transform a non-robust streaming algorithm into a robust one in various scenarios.
Defending computer networks from cyber attack requires timely responses to alerts and threat intelligence. Decisions about how to respond involve coordinating actions across multiple nodes based on imperfect indicators of compromise while minimizing disruptions to network operations. Currently, playbooks are used to automate portions of a response process, but often leave complex decision-making to a human analyst. In this work, we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to autonomous response and recovery in large industrial control networks. We propose an attention-based neural architecture that is flexible to the size of the network under protection. To train and evaluate the autonomous defender agent, we present an industrial control network simulation environment suitable for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the learned agent can effectively mitigate advanced attacks that progress with few observable signals over several months before execution. The proposed deep reinforcement learning approach outperforms a fully automated playbook method in simulation, taking less disruptive actions while also defending more nodes on the network. The learned policy is also more robust to changes in attacker behavior than playbook approaches.
Efficient reasoning about the semantic, spatial, and temporal structure of a scene is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous driving. We present NEural ATtention fields (NEAT), a novel representation that enables such reasoning for end-to-end imitation learning models. NEAT is a continuous function which maps locations in Bird's Eye View (BEV) scene coordinates to waypoints and semantics, using intermediate attention maps to iteratively compress high-dimensional 2D image features into a compact representation. This allows our model to selectively attend to relevant regions in the input while ignoring information irrelevant to the driving task, effectively associating the images with the BEV representation. In a new evaluation setting involving adverse environmental conditions and challenging scenarios, NEAT outperforms several strong baselines and achieves driving scores on par with the privileged CARLA expert used to generate its training data. Furthermore, visualizing the attention maps for models with NEAT intermediate representations provides improved interpretability.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.
Convolutions on monocular dash cam videos capture spatial invariances in the image plane but do not explicitly reason about distances and depth. We propose a simple transformation of observations into a bird's eye view, also known as plan view, for end-to-end control. We detect vehicles and pedestrians in the first person view and project them into an overhead plan view. This representation provides an abstraction of the environment from which a deep network can easily deduce the positions and directions of entities. Additionally, the plan view enables us to leverage advances in 3D object detection in conjunction with deep policy learning. We evaluate our monocular plan view network on the photo-realistic Grand Theft Auto V simulator. A network using both a plan view and front view causes less than half as many collisions as previous detection-based methods and an order of magnitude fewer collisions than pure pixel-based policies.
The use of object detection algorithms is becoming increasingly important in autonomous vehicles, and object detection at high accuracy and a fast inference speed is essential for safe autonomous driving. A false positive (FP) from a false localization during autonomous driving can lead to fatal accidents and hinder safe and efficient driving. Therefore, a detection algorithm that can cope with mislocalizations is required in autonomous driving applications. This paper proposes a method for improving the detection accuracy while supporting a real-time operation by modeling the bounding box (bbox) of YOLOv3, which is the most representative of one-stage detectors, with a Gaussian parameter and redesigning the loss function. In addition, this paper proposes a method for predicting the localization uncertainty that indicates the reliability of bbox. By using the predicted localization uncertainty during the detection process, the proposed schemes can significantly reduce the FP and increase the true positive (TP), thereby improving the accuracy. Compared to a conventional YOLOv3, the proposed algorithm, Gaussian YOLOv3, improves the mean average precision (mAP) by 3.09 and 3.5 on the KITTI and Berkeley deep drive (BDD) datasets, respectively. In addition, on the same datasets, the proposed algorithm can reduce the FP by 41.40% and 40.62%, and increase the TP by 7.26% and 4.3%, respectively. Nevertheless, the proposed algorithm is capable of real-time detection at faster than 42 frames per second (fps).
Safety and decline of road traffic accidents remain important issues of autonomous driving. Statistics show that unintended lane departure is a leading cause of worldwide motor vehicle collisions, making lane detection the most promising and challenge task for self-driving. Today, numerous groups are combining deep learning techniques with computer vision problems to solve self-driving problems. In this paper, a Global Convolution Networks (GCN) model is used to address both classification and localization issues for semantic segmentation of lane. We are using color-based segmentation is presented and the usability of the model is evaluated. A residual-based boundary refinement and Adam optimization is also used to achieve state-of-art performance. As normal cars could not afford GPUs on the car, and training session for a particular road could be shared by several cars. We propose a framework to get it work in real world. We build a real time video transfer system to get video from the car, get the model trained in edge server (which is equipped with GPUs), and send the trained model back to the car.
Although deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) methods have lots of strengths that are favorable if applied to autonomous driving, real deep RL applications in autonomous driving have been slowed down by the modeling gap between the source (training) domain and the target (deployment) domain. Unlike current policy transfer approaches, which generally limit to the usage of uninterpretable neural network representations as the transferred features, we propose to transfer concrete kinematic quantities in autonomous driving. The proposed robust-control-based (RC) generic transfer architecture, which we call RL-RC, incorporates a transferable hierarchical RL trajectory planner and a robust tracking controller based on disturbance observer (DOB). The deep RL policies trained with known nominal dynamics model are transfered directly to the target domain, DOB-based robust tracking control is applied to tackle the modeling gap including the vehicle dynamics errors and the external disturbances such as side forces. We provide simulations validating the capability of the proposed method to achieve zero-shot transfer across multiple driving scenarios such as lane keeping, lane changing and obstacle avoidance.
Autonomous urban driving navigation with complex multi-agent dynamics is under-explored due to the difficulty of learning an optimal driving policy. The traditional modular pipeline heavily relies on hand-designed rules and the pre-processing perception system while the supervised learning-based models are limited by the accessibility of extensive human experience. We present a general and principled Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) approach which successfully makes the driving agent achieve higher success rates based on only vision inputs in a high-fidelity car simulator. To alleviate the low exploration efficiency for large continuous action space that often prohibits the use of classical RL on challenging real tasks, our CIRL explores over a reasonably constrained action space guided by encoded experiences that imitate human demonstrations, building upon Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Moreover, we propose to specialize adaptive policies and steering-angle reward designs for different control signals (i.e. follow, straight, turn right, turn left) based on the shared representations to improve the model capability in tackling with diverse cases. Extensive experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that CIRL substantially outperforms all previous methods in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes on a variety of goal-directed driving tasks. We also show its superior generalization capability in unseen environments. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of the learned driving policy through reinforcement learning in the high-fidelity simulator, which performs better-than supervised imitation learning.