Many autonomous driving motion planners generate trajectories by optimizing a reward cost functional. Designing and tuning a high-performance reward cost functional for Level-4 autonomous driving vehicles with exposure to different driving conditions is challenging. Traditionally, reward cost functional tuning involves substantial human effort and time spent on both simulations and road tests. As the scenario becomes more complicated, tuning to improve the motion planner performance becomes increasingly difficult. To systematically solve this issue, we develop a data-driven auto-tuning framework based on the Apollo autonomous driving framework. The framework includes a novel rank-based conditional inverse reinforcement learning algorithm, an offline training strategy and an automatic method of collecting and labeling data. Our auto-tuning framework has the following advantages that make it suitable for tuning an autonomous driving motion planner. First, compared to that of most inverse reinforcement learning algorithms, our algorithm training is efficient and capable of being applied to different scenarios. Second, the offline training strategy offers a safe way to adjust the parameters before public road testing. Third, the expert driving data and information about the surrounding environment are collected and automatically labeled, which considerably reduces the manual effort. Finally, the motion planner tuned by the framework is examined via both simulation and public road testing and is shown to achieve good performance.
In this paper, we present the strategy for trajectory planning that was used on-board the vehicle that completed the 103 km of the Bertha-Benz-Memorial-Route fully autonomously. We suggest a local, continuous method that is derived from a variational formulation. The solution trajectory is the constrained extremum of an objective function that is designed to express dynamic feasibility and comfort. Static and dynamic obstacle constraints are incorporated in the form of polygons. The constraints are carefully designed to ensure that the solution converges to a single, global optimum. This article presents the architecture of Junior, a robotic vehicle capable of navigating urban environments autonomously. In doing so, the vehicle is able to select its own routes, perceive and interact with other traffic, and execute various urban driving skills including lane changes, U-turns, parking, and merging into moving traffic. The vehicle successfully finished and won second place in the DARPA Urban Challenge, a robot competition organized by the U.S. Government. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Safe handling of dynamic highway and inner city scenarios with autonomous vehicles involves the problem of generating traffic-adapted trajectories. In order to account for the practical requirements of the holistic autonomous system, we propose a semi-reactive trajectory generation method, which can be tightly integrated into the behavioral layer. The method realizes long-term objectives such as velocity keeping, merging, following, stopping, in combination with a reactive collision avoidance by means of optimal-control strategies within the Frenet-Frame [12] of the street. The capabilities of this approach are demonstrated in the simulation of a typical high-speed highway scenario. 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.