Robotics: Science and Systems XIV

Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning

Yunpeng Pan, Ching-An Cheng, Kamil Saigol, Keuntaek Lee, Xinyan Yan, Evangelos Theodorou, Byron Boots

Abstract:

We present an end-to-end imitation learning system for agile, off-road autonomous driving using only low-cost on-board sensors. By imitating a model predictive controller equipped with advanced sensors, we train a deep neural network control policy to map raw, high-dimensional observations to continuous steering and throttle commands. Compared with recent approaches to similar tasks, our method requires neither state estimation nor on-the-fly planning to navigate the vehicle. Our approach relies on, and experimentally validates, recent imitation learning theory. Empirically, we show that policies trained with online imitation learning overcome well-known challenges related to covariate shift and generalize better than policies trained with batch imitation learning. Built on these insights, our autonomous driving system demonstrates successful high-speed off-road driving, matching the state-of-the-art performance.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Pan-RSS-18, 
    AUTHOR    = {Yunpeng Pan AND Ching-An Cheng AND Kamil Saigol AND Keuntaek Lee AND Xinyan Yan AND Evangelos Theodorou AND Byron Boots}, 
    TITLE     = {Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2018}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania}, 
    MONTH     = {June}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2018.XIV.056} 
}