scholarly journals Safe Trajectory Synthesis for Autonomous Driving in Unforeseen Environments

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shreyas Kousik ◽  
Sean Vaskov ◽  
Matthew Johnson-Roberson ◽  
Ram Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Time Horizon ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Path Selection ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Trajectory Design ◽  
Model Mismatch ◽  
Set Intersection ◽  
Finite Time Horizon ◽  
Fidelity Model

Path planning for autonomous vehicles in arbitrary environments requires a guarantee of safety, but this can be impractical to ensure in real-time when the vehicle is described with a high-fidelity model. To address this problem, this paper develops a method to perform trajectory design by considering a low-fidelity model that accounts for model mismatch. The presented method begins by computing a conservative Forward Reachable Set (FRS) of a high-fidelity model’s trajectories produced when tracking trajectories of a low-fidelity model over a finite time horizon. At runtime, the vehicle intersects this FRS with obstacles in the environment to eliminate trajectories that can lead to a collision, then selects an optimal plan from the remaining safe set. By bounding the time for this set intersection and subsequent path selection, this paper proves a lower bound for the FRS time horizon and sensing horizon to guarantee safety. This method is demonstrated in simulation using a kinematic Dubin’s car as the low-fidelity model and a dynamic unicycle as the high-fidelity model.

scholarly journals Guaranteed Safe Reachability-based Trajectory Design for a High-Fidelity Model of an Autonomous Passenger Vehicle

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Vaskov ◽  
Utkarsh Sharma ◽  
Shreyas Kousik ◽  
Matthew Johnson-Roberson ◽  
Ramanarayan Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
High Fidelity ◽  
Trajectory Design ◽  
Passenger Vehicle ◽  
Fidelity Model

Transient Operation in Pipeline Compressor Stations

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Kurz ◽  
Robert C. White ◽  
Klaus Brun
Keyword(s):  
Time Horizon ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
Control Algorithms ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Driver Performance ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Compressor Installation ◽  
Demand Changes ◽  
Pipeline Model ◽  
Fidelity Model

Many pipelines are not operated under steady state conditions. This is in particular true for pipelines that are highly integrated with other pipelines, or have many different feed or gas take-off points. In many cases, the demand changes frequently, and cannot always be planned with a long time horizon. In this study, a simplified transient pipeline model, together with a high fidelity model of a compressor installation and its control system are used to evaluate control strategies that can optimize the fuel consumption and reaction time in these transient situations. The model for the compressor installation contains an accurate representation of the compressor and driver performance, together with the capability to simulate different, but realistic control strategies. This allows specific and general recommendations on the use of control algorithms.

Female Voice Agents in Fully Autonomous Vehicles Are Not Only More Likeable and Comfortable, But Also More Competent

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 1033-1037
Author(s):  
Jiayuan Dong ◽  
Emily Lawson ◽  
Jack Olsen ◽  
Myounghoon Jeon
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Preference Ranking ◽  
Uncanny Valley ◽  
Tracking Data ◽  
Effective Solution ◽  
User Perception ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The Voice

Driving agents can provide an effective solution to improve drivers’ trust in and to manage interactions with autonomous vehicles. Research has focused on voice-agents, while few have explored robot-agents or the comparison between the two. The present study tested two variables - voice gender and agent embodiment, using conversational scripts. Twenty participants experienced autonomous driving using the simulator for four agent conditions and filled out subjective questionnaires for their perception of each agent. Results showed that the participants perceived the voice only female agent as more likeable, more comfortable, and more competent than other conditions. Their final preference ranking also favored this agent over the others. Interestingly, eye-tracking data showed that embodied agents did not add more visual distractions than the voice only agents. The results are discussed with the traditional gender stereotype, uncanny valley, and participants’ gender. This study can contribute to the design of in-vehicle agents in the autonomous vehicles and future studies are planned to further identify the underlying mechanisms of user perception on different agents.

scholarly journals Collaborative Autonomous Driving—A Survey of Solution Approaches and Future Challenges

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3783
Author(s):  
Sumbal Malik ◽  
Manzoor Ahmed Khan ◽  
Hesham El-Sayed
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Use Cases ◽  
Cooperative Driving ◽  
Vehicle To Vehicle ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Vehicle To Infrastructure ◽  
High Level ◽  
Intersection Management

Sooner than expected, roads will be populated with a plethora of connected and autonomous vehicles serving diverse mobility needs. Rather than being stand-alone, vehicles will be required to cooperate and coordinate with each other, referred to as cooperative driving executing the mobility tasks properly. Cooperative driving leverages Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies aiming to carry out cooperative functionalities: (i) cooperative sensing and (ii) cooperative maneuvering. To better equip the readers with background knowledge on the topic, we firstly provide the detailed taxonomy section describing the underlying concepts and various aspects of cooperation in cooperative driving. In this survey, we review the current solution approaches in cooperation for autonomous vehicles, based on various cooperative driving applications, i.e., smart car parking, lane change and merge, intersection management, and platooning. The role and functionality of such cooperation become more crucial in platooning use-cases, which is why we also focus on providing more details of platooning use-cases and focus on one of the challenges, electing a leader in high-level platooning. Following, we highlight a crucial range of research gaps and open challenges that need to be addressed before cooperative autonomous vehicles hit the roads. We believe that this survey will assist the researchers in better understanding vehicular cooperation, its various scenarios, solution approaches, and challenges.

The Impact of Mental States on Semi-autonomous Driving Takeover Performance: A Systematic Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 1372-1376
Author(s):  
Gaojian Huang ◽  
Christine Petersen ◽  
Brandon J. Pitts
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Manual Control ◽  
Monitoring Systems ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Impact

Semi-autonomous vehicles still require drivers to occasionally resume manual control. However, drivers of these vehicles may have different mental states. For example, drivers may be engaged in non-driving related tasks or may exhibit mind wandering behavior. Also, monitoring monotonous driving environments can result in passive fatigue. Given the potential for different types of mental states to negatively affect takeover performance, it will be critical to highlight how mental states affect semi-autonomous takeover. A systematic review was conducted to synthesize the literature on mental states (such as distraction, fatigue, emotion) and takeover performance. This review focuses specifically on five fatigue studies. Overall, studies were too few to observe consistent findings, but some suggest that response times to takeover alerts and post-takeover performance may be affected by fatigue. Ultimately, this review may help researchers improve and develop real-time mental states monitoring systems for a wide range of application domains.

scholarly journals A Set of Single YOLO Modalities to Detect Occluded Entities via Viewpoint Conversion

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 6016
Author(s):  
Jinsoo Kim ◽  
Jeongho Cho
Keyword(s):  
Object Detection ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Cloud Data ◽  
Detection Techniques ◽  
Bounding Boxes ◽  
Partially Occluded ◽  
Rgb Image

For autonomous vehicles, it is critical to be aware of the driving environment to avoid collisions and drive safely. The recent evolution of convolutional neural networks has contributed significantly to accelerating the development of object detection techniques that enable autonomous vehicles to handle rapid changes in various driving environments. However, collisions in an autonomous driving environment can still occur due to undetected obstacles and various perception problems, particularly occlusion. Thus, we propose a robust object detection algorithm for environments in which objects are truncated or occluded by employing RGB image and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) bird’s eye view (BEV) representations. This structure combines independent detection results obtained in parallel through “you only look once” networks using an RGB image and a height map converted from the BEV representations of LiDAR’s point cloud data (PCD). The region proposal of an object is determined via non-maximum suppression, which suppresses the bounding boxes of adjacent regions. A performance evaluation of the proposed scheme was performed using the KITTI vision benchmark suite dataset. The results demonstrate the detection accuracy in the case of integration of PCD BEV representations is superior to when only an RGB camera is used. In addition, robustness is improved by significantly enhancing detection accuracy even when the target objects are partially occluded when viewed from the front, which demonstrates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional RGB-based model.

Transfer Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Aravind Balakrishnan ◽  
Jaeyoung Lee ◽  
Ashish Gaurav ◽  
Krzysztof Czarnecki ◽  
Sean Sedwards
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Transfer Problem ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
High Fidelity ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
High Level ◽  
Real Vehicle

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an attractive way to implement high-level decision-making policies for autonomous driving, but learning directly from a real vehicle or a high-fidelity simulator is variously infeasible. We therefore consider the problem of transfer reinforcement learning and study how a policy learned in a simple environment using WiseMove can be transferred to our high-fidelity simulator, W ise M ove . WiseMove is a framework to study safety and other aspects of RL for autonomous driving. W ise M ove accurately reproduces the dynamics and software stack of our real vehicle. We find that the accurately modelled perception errors in W ise M ove contribute the most to the transfer problem. These errors, when even naively modelled in WiseMove , provide an RL policy that performs better in W ise M ove than a hand-crafted rule-based policy. Applying domain randomization to the environment in WiseMove yields an even better policy. The final RL policy reduces the failures due to perception errors from 10% to 2.75%. We also observe that the RL policy has significantly less reliance on velocity compared to the rule-based policy, having learned that its measurement is unreliable.

scholarly journals A Constrained Markovian Diffusion Model for Controlling the Pollution Accumulation

Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (13) ◽  
pp. 1466
Author(s):  
Beatris Adriana Escobedo-Trujillo ◽  
José Daniel López-Barrientos ◽  
Javier Garrido-Meléndez
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Programming ◽  
Dirichlet Problem ◽  
Stochastic Control ◽  
Finite Time ◽  
Time Horizon ◽  
Closed Loop ◽  
Programming Techniques ◽  
Pollution Accumulation ◽  
Finite Time Horizon ◽  
The Cost

This work presents a study of a finite-time horizon stochastic control problem with restrictions on both the reward and the cost functions. To this end, it uses standard dynamic programming techniques, and an extension of the classic Lagrange multipliers approach. The coefficients considered here are supposed to be unbounded, and the obtained strategies are of non-stationary closed-loop type. The driving thread of the paper is a sequence of examples on a pollution accumulation model, which is used for the purpose of showing three algorithms for the purpose of replicating the results. There, the reader can find a result on the interchangeability of limits in a Dirichlet problem.

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