The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

Improved AutoEncoder with LSTM module and KL divergence

The task of anomaly detection is to separate anomalous data from normal data in the dataset. Models such as deep convolutional autoencoder (CAE) network and deep supporting vector data description (SVDD) model have been universally employed and have demonstrated significant success in detecting anomalies. However, the over-reconstruction ability of CAE network for anomalous data can easily lead to high false negative rate in detecting anomalous data. On the other hand, the deep SVDD model has the drawback of feature collapse, which leads to a decrease of detection accuracy for anomalies. To address these problems, we propose the Improved AutoEncoder with LSTM module and Kullback-Leibler divergence (IAE-LSTM-KL) model in this paper. An LSTM network is added after the encoder to memorize feature representations of normal data. In the meanwhile, the phenomenon of feature collapse can also be mitigated by penalizing the featured input to SVDD module via KL divergence. The efficacy of the IAE-LSTM-KL model is validated through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results show that IAE-LSTM-KL model yields higher detection accuracy for anomalies. In addition, it is also found that the IAE-LSTM-KL model demonstrates enhanced robustness to contaminated outliers in the dataset.