Deep learning has revolutionized the ability to learn "end-to-end" autonomous vehicle control directly from raw sensory data. While there have been recent extensions to handle forms of navigation instruction, these works are unable to capture the full distribution of possible actions that could be taken and to reason about localization of the robot within the environment. In this paper, we extend end-to-end driving networks with the ability to perform point-to-point navigation as well as probabilistic localization using only noisy GPS data. We define a novel variational network capable of learning from raw camera data of the environment as well as higher level roadmaps to predict (1) a full probability distribution over the possible control commands; and (2) a deterministic control command capable of navigating on the route specified within the map. Additionally, we formulate how our model can be used to localize the robot according to correspondences between the map and the observed visual road topology, inspired by the rough localization that human drivers can perform. We test our algorithms on real-world driving data that the vehicle has never driven through before, and integrate our point-to-point navigation algorithms onboard a full-scale autonomous vehicle for real-time performance. Our localization algorithm is also evaluated over a new set of roads and intersections to demonstrates rough pose localization even in situations without any GPS prior.
Our work ties in to several related efforts in both control and localization. As opposed to traditional methods for autonomous driving which typically rely on distinct algorithms for localization and mapping @cite_10 @cite_16 @cite_3 , planning @cite_22 @cite_11 @cite_31 , and control @cite_30 @cite_28 , end-to-end algorithms attempt to collapse the problem (directly from raw sensory data to output control commands) into a single learned model. The ALVINN system @cite_12 originally proposed the use of multilayer perceptron to learn the direction a vehicle should steer in 1989. Recent advancements in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the ability to learn driving control (i.e. steering wheel angle or road curvature) from raw imagery @cite_21 . Followup works have incorporated conditioning on additional cues @cite_20 , including mapped information @cite_32 @cite_8 . However, these works are still quite limited in that they do not capture the uncertainty of multiple outcomes, nor present the ability to reason about discrepancy between their input modalities.
@cite_30 @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_21 @cite_20 @cite_32 @cite_3 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_11
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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been successfully applied to autonomous driving tasks, many in an end-to-end manner. Previous end-to-end steering control methods take an image or an image sequence as the input and directly predict the steering angle with CNN. Although single task learning on steering angles has reported good performances, the steering angle alone is not sufficient for vehicle control. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning framework to predict the steering angle and speed control simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. Since it is nontrivial to predict accurate speed values with only visual inputs, we first propose a network to predict discrete speed commands and steering angles with image sequences. Moreover, we propose a multi-modal multi-task network to predict speed values and steering angles by taking previous feedback speeds and visual recordings as inputs. Experiments are conducted on the public Udacity dataset and a newly collected SAIC dataset. Results show that the proposed model predicts steering angles and speed values accurately. Furthermore, we improve the failure data synthesis methods to solve the problem of error accumulation in real road tests. We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to map raw pixels from a single front-facing camera directly to steering commands. This end-to-end approach proved surprisingly powerful. With minimum training data from humans the system learns to drive in traffic on local roads with or without lane markings and on highways. It also operates in areas with unclear visual guidance such as in parking lots and on unpaved roads. The system automatically learns internal representations of the necessary processing steps such as detecting useful road features with only the human steering angle as the training signal. We never explicitly trained it to detect, for example, the outline of roads. Compared to explicit decomposition of the problem, such as lane marking detection, path planning, and control, our end-to-end system optimizes all processing steps simultaneously. We argue that this will eventually lead to better performance and smaller systems. Better performance will result because the internal components self-optimize to maximize overall system performance, instead of optimizing human-selected intermediate criteria, e.g., lane detection. Such criteria understandably are selected for ease of human interpretation which doesn't automatically guarantee maximum system performance. Smaller networks are possible because the system learns to solve the problem with the minimal number of processing steps. We used an NVIDIA DevBox and Torch 7 for training and an NVIDIA DRIVE(TM) PX self-driving car computer also running Torch 7 for determining where to drive. The system operates at 30 frames per second (FPS). Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to perform extremely well at a variety of tasks including subtasks of autonomous driving such as image segmentation and object classification. However, networks designed for these tasks typically require vast quantities of training data and long training periods to converge. We investigate the design rationale behind end-to-end driving network designs by proposing and comparing three small and computationally inexpensive deep end-to-end neural network models that generate driving control signals directly from input images. In contrast to prior work that segments the autonomous driving task, our models take on a novel approach to the autonomous driving problem by utilizing deep and thin Fully Convolutional Nets (FCNs) with recurrent neural nets and low parameter counts to tackle a complex end-to-end regression task predicting both steering and acceleration commands. In addition, we include layers optimized for classification to allow the networks to implicitly learn image semantics. We show that the resulting networks use 3x fewer parameters than the most recent comparable end-to-end driving network and 500x fewer parameters than the AlexNet variations and converge both faster and to lower losses while maintaining robustness against overfitting. Deep learning has revolutionized the ability to learn "end-to-end" autonomous vehicle control directly from raw sensory data. While there have been recent extensions to handle forms of navigation instruction, these works are unable to capture the full distribution of possible actions that could be taken and to reason about localization of the robot within the environment. In this paper, we extend end-to-end driving networks with the ability to perform point-to-point navigation as well as probabilistic localization using only noisy GPS data. We define a novel variational network capable of learning from raw camera data of the environment as well as higher level roadmaps to predict (1) a full probability distribution over the possible control commands; and (2) a deterministic control command capable of navigating on the route specified within the map. Additionally, we formulate how our model can be used to localize the robot according to correspondences between the map and the observed visual road topology, inspired by the rough localization that human drivers can perform. We test our algorithms on real-world driving data that the vehicle has never driven through before, and integrate our point-to-point navigation algorithms onboard a full-scale autonomous vehicle for real-time performance. Our localization algorithm is also evaluated over a new set of roads and intersections to demonstrates rough pose localization even in situations without any GPS prior.