An important capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is autonomous landing while avoiding collision with obstacles in the process. Such capability requires real-time local trajectory planning. Although trajectory-planning methods have been introduced for cases such as emergency landing, they have not been evaluated in real-life scenarios where only the surface of obstacles can be sensed and detected. We propose a novel optimization framework using a pre-planned global path and a priority map of the landing area. Several trajectory planning algorithms were implemented and evaluated in a simulator that includes a 3D urban environment, LiDAR-based obstacle-surface sensing and UAV guidance and dynamics. We show that using our proposed optimization criterion can successfully improve the landing-mission success probability while avoiding collisions with obstacles in real-time.
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.
We present Neural A*, a novel data-driven search method for path planning problems. Despite the recent increasing attention to data-driven path planning, a machine learning approach to search-based planning is still challenging due to the discrete nature of search algorithms. In this work, we reformulate a canonical A* search algorithm to be differentiable and couple it with a convolutional encoder to form an end-to-end trainable neural network planner. Neural A* solves a path planning problem by encoding a problem instance to a guidance map and then performing the differentiable A* search with the guidance map. By learning to match the search results with ground-truth paths provided by experts, Neural A* can produce a path consistent with the ground truth accurately and efficiently. Our extensive experiments confirmed that Neural A* outperformed state-of-the-art data-driven planners in terms of the search optimality and efficiency trade-off, and furthermore, successfully predicted realistic human trajectories by directly performing search-based planning on natural image inputs.
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.
Recent advances in sensor and mobile devices have enabled an unprecedented increase in the availability and collection of urban trajectory data, thus increasing the demand for more efficient ways to manage and analyze the data being produced. In this survey, we comprehensively review recent research trends in trajectory data management, ranging from trajectory pre-processing, storage, common trajectory analytic tools, such as querying spatial-only and spatial-textual trajectory data, and trajectory clustering. We also explore four closely related analytical tasks commonly used with trajectory data in interactive or real-time processing. Deep trajectory learning is also reviewed for the first time. Finally, we outline the essential qualities that a trajectory management system should possess in order to maximize flexibility.
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.
Online multi-object tracking (MOT) is extremely important for high-level spatial reasoning and path planning for autonomous and highly-automated vehicles. In this paper, we present a modular framework for tracking multiple objects (vehicles), capable of accepting object proposals from different sensor modalities (vision and range) and a variable number of sensors, to produce continuous object tracks. This work is inspired by traditional tracking-by-detection approaches in computer vision, with some key differences - First, we track objects across multiple cameras and across different sensor modalities. This is done by fusing object proposals across sensors accurately and efficiently. Second, the objects of interest (targets) are tracked directly in the real world. This is a departure from traditional techniques where objects are simply tracked in the image plane. Doing so allows the tracks to be readily used by an autonomous agent for navigation and related tasks. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we test it on real world highway data collected from a heavily sensorized testbed capable of capturing full-surround information. We demonstrate that our framework is well-suited to track objects through entire maneuvers around the ego-vehicle, some of which take more than a few minutes to complete. We also leverage the modularity of our approach by comparing the effects of including/excluding different sensors, changing the total number of sensors, and the quality of object proposals on the final tracking result.
TraQuad is an autonomous tracking quadcopter capable of tracking any moving (or static) object like cars, humans, other drones or any other object on-the-go. This article describes the applications and advantages of TraQuad and the reduction in cost (to about 250$) that has been achieved so far using the hardware and software capabilities and our custom algorithms wherever needed. This description is backed by strong data and the research analyses which have been drawn out of extant information or conducted on own when necessary. This also describes the development of completely autonomous (even GPS is optional) low-cost drone which can act as a major platform for further developments in automation, transportation, reconnaissance and more. We describe our ROS Gazebo simulator and our STATUS algorithms which form the core of our development of our object tracking drone for generic purposes.