Automating the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in diverse scenarios has gained much attention in recent years. However, teaching UAVs to fly in challenging environments remains an unsolved problem, mainly due to the lack of training data. In this paper, we train a deep neural network to predict UAV controls from raw image data for the task of autonomous UAV racing in a photo-realistic simulation. Training is done through imitation learning with data augmentation to allow for the correction of navigation mistakes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained network (when sufficient data augmentation is used) outperforms state-of-the-art methods and flies more consistently than many human pilots. Additionally, we show that our optimized network architecture can run in real-time on embedded hardware, allowing for efficient on-board processing critical for real-world deployment. From a broader perspective, our results underline the importance of extensive data augmentation techniques to improve robustness in end-to-end learning setups.
In the work of @cite_11 , a deep neural network (DNN) is trained to map recorded camera views to 3-DoF steering commands (steering wheel angle, throttle, and brake). Seventy-two hours of human driven training data was tediously collected from a forward facing camera and augmented with two additional views to provide data for simulated drifting and corrective maneuvering. The simulated and on-road results of this pioneering work demonstrate the ability of a DNN to learn (end-to-end) the control process of a self-driving car from raw video data.
@cite_11
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Lane keeping is an important feature for self-driving cars. This paper presents an end-to-end learning approach to obtain the proper steering angle to maintain the car in the lane. The convolutional neural network (CNN) model takes raw image frames as input and outputs the steering angles accordingly. The model is trained and evaluated using the comma.ai dataset, which contains the front view image frames and the steering angle data captured when driving on the road. Unlike the traditional approach that manually decomposes the autonomous driving problem into technical components such as lane detection, path planning and steering control, the end-to-end model can directly steer the vehicle from the front view camera data after training. It learns how to keep in lane from human driving data. Further discussion of this end-to-end approach and its limitation are also provided. 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). In recent years, autonomous driving algorithms using low-cost vehicle-mounted cameras have attracted increasing endeavors from both academia and industry. There are multiple fronts to these endeavors, including object detection on roads, 3-D reconstruction etc., but in this work we focus on a vision-based model that directly maps raw input images to steering angles using deep networks. This represents a nascent research topic in computer vision. The technical contributions of this work are three-fold. First, the model is learned and evaluated on real human driving videos that are time-synchronized with other vehicle sensors. This differs from many prior models trained from synthetic data in racing games. Second, state-of-the-art models, such as PilotNet, mostly predict the wheel angles independently on each video frame, which contradicts common understanding of driving as a stateful process. Instead, our proposed model strikes a combination of spatial and temporal cues, jointly investigating instantaneous monocular camera observations and vehicle's historical states. This is in practice accomplished by inserting carefully-designed recurrent units (e.g., LSTM and Conv-LSTM) at proper network layers. Third, to facilitate the interpretability of the learned model, we utilize a visual back-propagation scheme for discovering and visualizing image regions crucially influencing the final steering prediction. Our experimental study is based on about 6 hours of human driving data provided by Udacity. Comprehensive quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model, even under scenarios like drastic lighting changes and abrupt turning. The comparison with other state-of-the-art models clearly reveals its superior performance in predicting the due wheel angle for a self-driving car. We describe a vision-based obstacle avoidance system for off-road mobile robots. The system is trained from end to end to map raw input images to steering angles. It is trained in supervised mode to predict the steering angles provided by a human driver during training runs collected in a wide variety of terrains, weather conditions, lighting conditions, and obstacle types. The robot is a 50cm off-road truck, with two forward-pointing wireless color cameras. A remote computer processes the video and controls the robot via radio. The learning system is a large 6-layer convolutional network whose input is a single left right pair of unprocessed low-resolution images. The robot exhibits an excellent ability to detect obstacles and navigate around them in real time at speeds of 2 m s.