Robotics: Science and Systems XV

LeTS-Drive: Driving in a Crowd by Learning from Tree Search

Panpan Cai, Yuanfu Luo, Aseem Saxena, David Hsu, Wee Sun Lee

Abstract:

Autonomous driving in a crowded environment, e.g., a busy traffic intersection, is an unsolved challenge for robotics. The robot vehicle must contend with a dynamic and partially observable environment, noisy sensors, and many agents. A principled approach is to formalize it as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and solve it through online belief-tree search. To handle a large crowd and achieve real-time performance in this very challenging setting, we propose LeTS-Drive, which integrates online POMDP planning and deep learning. It consists of two phases. In the offline phase, we learn a policy and the corresponding value function by imitating the belief tree search. In the online phase, the learned policy and value function guide the belief tree search. LeTS-Drive leverages the robustness of planning and the runtime efficiency of learning to enhance the performance of both. Experimental results in simulation show that LeTS-Drive outperforms either planning or imitation learning alone and develops sophisticated driving skills.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Lee-RSS-19, 
    AUTHOR    = {Panpan Cai AND Yuanfu Luo AND Aseem Saxena AND David Hsu AND Wee Sun Lee}, 
    TITLE     = {LeTS-Drive: Driving in a Crowd by Learning from Tree Search}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2019}, 
    ADDRESS   = {FreiburgimBreisgau, Germany}, 
    MONTH     = {June}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2019.XV.018} 
}