Reinforcement learning is considered to be a strong AI paradigm which can be used to teach machines through interaction with the environment and learning from their mistakes. Despite its perceived utility, it has not yet been successfully applied in automotive applications. Motivated by the successful demonstrations of learning of Atari games and Go by Google DeepMind, we propose a framework for autonomous driving using deep reinforcement learning. This is of particular relevance as it is difficult to pose autonomous driving as a supervised learning problem due to strong interactions with the environment including other vehicles, pedestrians and roadworks. As it is a relatively new area of research for autonomous driving, we provide a short overview of deep reinforcement learning and then describe our proposed framework. It incorporates Recurrent Neural Networks for information integration, enabling the car to handle partially observable scenarios. It also integrates the recent work on attention models to focus on relevant information, thereby reducing the computational complexity for deployment on embedded hardware. The framework was tested in an open source 3D car racing simulator called TORCS. Our simulation results demonstrate learning of autonomous maneuvering in a scenario of complex road curvatures and simple interaction of other vehicles.
Moving object detection is a critical task for autonomous vehicles. As dynamic objects represent higher collision risk than static ones, our own ego-trajectories have to be planned attending to the future states of the moving elements of the scene. Motion can be perceived using temporal information such as optical flow. Conventional optical flow computation is based on camera sensors only, which makes it prone to failure in conditions with low illumination. On the other hand, LiDAR sensors are independent of illumination, as they measure the time-of-flight of their own emitted lasers. In this work, we propose a robust and real-time CNN architecture for Moving Object Detection (MOD) under low-light conditions by capturing motion information from both camera and LiDAR sensors. We demonstrate the impact of our algorithm on KITTI dataset where we simulate a low-light environment creating a novel dataset "Dark-KITTI". We obtain a 10.1% relative improvement on Dark-KITTI, and a 4.25% improvement on standard KITTI relative to our baselines. The proposed algorithm runs at 18 fps on a standard desktop GPU using 256 × 1224 resolution images.
Object detection and classification in 3D is a key task in Automated Driving (AD). LiDAR sensors are employed to provide the 3D point cloud reconstruction of the surrounding environment, while the task of 3D object bounding box detection in real time remains a strong algorithmic challenge. In this paper, we build on the success of the oneshot regression meta-architecture in the 2D perspective image space and extend it to generate oriented 3D object bounding boxes from LiDAR point cloud. Our main contribution is in extending the loss function of YOLO v2 to include the yaw angle, the 3D box center in Cartesian coordinates and the height of the box as a direct regression problem. This formulation enables real-time performance, which is essential for automated driving. Our results are showing promising figures on KITTI benchmark, achieving real-time performance (40 fps) on Titan X GPU.
LiDAR has become a standard sensor for autonomous driving applications as they provide highly precise 3D point clouds. LiDAR is also robust for low-light scenarios at night-time or due to shadows where the performance of cameras is degraded. LiDAR perception is gradually becoming mature for algorithms including object detection and SLAM. However, semantic segmentation algorithm remains to be relatively less explored. Motivated by the fact that semantic segmentation is a mature algorithm on image data, we explore sensor fusion based 3D segmentation. Our main contribution is to convert the RGB image to a polar-grid mapping representation used for LiDAR and design early and mid-level fusion architectures. Additionally, we design a hybrid fusion architecture that combines both fusion algorithms. We evaluate our algorithm on KITTI dataset which provides segmentation annotation for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. We evaluate two state-of-the-art architectures namely SqueezeSeg and PointSeg and improve the mIoU score by 10% in both cases relative to the LiDAR only baseline.
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