End-to-End Driving via Self-Supervised Imitation Learning Using Camera and LiDAR Data

In autonomous driving, the end-to-end (E2E) driving approach that predicts vehicle control signals directly from sensor data is rapidly gaining attention. To learn a safe E2E driving system, one needs an extensive amount of driving data and human intervention. Vehicle control data is constructed by many hours of human driving, and it is challenging to construct large vehicle control datasets. Often, publicly available driving datasets are collected with limited driving scenes, and collecting vehicle control data is only available by vehicle manufacturers. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the first self-supervised learning framework, self-supervised imitation learning (SSIL), that can learn E2E driving networks without using driving command data. To construct pseudo steering angle data, proposed SSIL predicts a pseudo target from the vehicle's poses at the current and previous time points that are estimated with light detection and ranging sensors. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed SSIL framework achieves comparable E2E driving accuracy with the supervised learning counterpart. In addition, our qualitative analyses using a conventional visual explanation tool show that trained NNs by proposed SSIL and the supervision counterpart attend similar objects in making predictions.