Autonomous vehicles are more likely to be accepted if they drive accurately, comfortably, but also similar to how human drivers would. This is especially true when autonomous and human-driven vehicles need to share the same road. The main research focus thus far, however, is still on improving driving accuracy only. This paper formalizes the three concerns with the aim of accurate, comfortable and human-like driving. Three contributions are made in this paper. First, numerical map data from HERE Technologies are employed for more accurate driving; a set of map features which are believed to be relevant to driving are engineered to navigate better. Second, the learning procedure is improved from a pointwise prediction to a sequence-based prediction and passengers' comfort measures are embedded into the learning algorithm. Finally, we take advantage of the advances in adversary learning to learn human-like driving; specifically, the standard L1 or L2 loss is augmented by an adversary loss which is based on a discriminator trained to distinguish between human driving and machine driving. Our model is trained and evaluated on the Drive360 dataset, which features 60 hours and 3000 km of real-world driving data. Extensive experiments show that our driving model is more accurate, more comfortable and behaves more like a human driver than previous methods. The resources of this work will be released on the project page.
Boss is an autonomous vehicle that uses on-board sensors (global positioning system, lasers, radars, and cameras) to track other vehicles, detect static obstacles, and localize itself relative to a road model. A three-layer planning system combines mission, behavioral, and motion planning to drive in urban environments. The mission planning layer considers which street to take to achieve a mission goal. The behavioral layer determines when to change lanes and precedence at intersections and performs error recovery maneuvers. The motion planning layer selects actions to avoid obstacles while making progress toward local goals. The system was developed from the ground up to address the requirements of the DARPA Urban Challenge using a spiral system development process with a heavy emphasis on regular, regressive system testing. During the National Qualification Event and the 85-km Urban Challenge Final Event, Boss demonstrated some of its capabilities, qualifying first and winning the challenge. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.