Dynamics Modeling using Visual Terrain Features for High-Speed Autonomous Off-Road Driving

Rapid autonomous traversal of unstructured terrain is essential for scenarios such as disaster response, search and rescue, or planetary exploration. As a vehicle navigates at the limit of its capabilities over extreme terrain, its dynamics can change suddenly and dramatically. For example, high-speed and varying terrain can affect parameters such as traction, tire slip, and rolling resistance. To achieve effective planning in such environments, it is crucial to have a dynamics model that can accurately anticipate these conditions. In this work, we present a hybrid model that predicts the changing dynamics induced by the terrain as a function of visual inputs. We leverage a pre-trained visual foundation model (VFM) DINOv2, which provides rich features that encode fine-grained semantic information. To use this dynamics model for planning, we propose an end-to-end training architecture for a projection distance independent feature encoder that compresses the information from the VFM, enabling the creation of a lightweight map of the environment at runtime. We validate our architecture on an extensive dataset (hundreds of kilometers of aggressive off-road driving) collected across multiple locations as part of the DARPA Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dycTXxEosMk

MPPI-Generic: A CUDA Library for Stochastic Optimization

This paper introduces a new C++/CUDA library for GPU-accelerated stochastic optimization called MPPI-Generic. It provides implementations of Model Predictive Path Integral control, Tube-Model Predictive Path Integral Control, and Robust Model Predictive Path Integral Control, and allows for these algorithms to be used across many pre-existing dynamics models and cost functions. Furthermore, researchers can create their own dynamics models or cost functions following our API definitions without needing to change the actual Model Predictive Path Integral Control code. Finally, we compare computational performance to other popular implementations of Model Predictive Path Integral Control over a variety of GPUs to show the real-time capabilities our library can allow for. Library code can be found at: https://acdslab.github.io/mppi-generic-website/ .

Low Frequency Sampling in Model Predictive Path Integral Control

Sampling-based model-predictive controllers have become a powerful optimization tool for planning and control problems in various challenging environments. In this paper, we show how the default choice of uncorrelated Gaussian distributions can be improved upon with the use of a colored noise distribution. Our choice of distribution allows for the emphasis on low frequency control signals, which can result in smoother and more exploratory samples. We use this frequency-based sampling distribution with Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) in both hardware and simulation experiments to show better or equal performance on systems with various speeds of input response.

A Multi-step Dynamics Modeling Framework For Autonomous Driving In Multiple Environments

Modeling dynamics is often the first step to making a vehicle autonomous. While on-road autonomous vehicles have been extensively studied, off-road vehicles pose many challenging modeling problems. An off-road vehicle encounters highly complex and difficult-to-model terrain/vehicle interactions, as well as having complex vehicle dynamics of its own. These complexities can create challenges for effective high-speed control and planning. In this paper, we introduce a framework for multistep dynamics prediction that explicitly handles the accumulation of modeling error and remains scalable for sampling-based controllers. Our method uses a specially-initialized Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) over a limited time horizon as the learned component in a hybrid model to predict the dynamics of a 4-person seating all-terrain vehicle (Polaris S4 1000 RZR) in two distinct environments. By only having the LSTM predict over a fixed time horizon, we negate the need for long term stability that is often a challenge when training recurrent neural networks. Our framework is flexible as it only requires odometry information for labels. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our method is able to predict millions of possible trajectories in real-time, with a time horizon of five seconds in challenging off road driving scenarios.

Variational Inference MPC using Tsallis Divergence

In this paper, we provide a generalized framework for Variational Inference-Stochastic Optimal Control by using thenon-extensive Tsallis divergence. By incorporating the deformed exponential function into the optimality likelihood function, a novel Tsallis Variational Inference-Model Predictive Control algorithm is derived, which includes prior works such as Variational Inference-Model Predictive Control, Model Predictive PathIntegral Control, Cross Entropy Method, and Stein VariationalInference Model Predictive Control as special cases. The proposed algorithm allows for effective control of the cost/reward transform and is characterized by superior performance in terms of mean and variance reduction of the associated cost. The aforementioned features are supported by a theoretical and numerical analysis on the level of risk sensitivity of the proposed algorithm as well as simulation experiments on 5 different robotic systems with 3 different policy parameterizations.

Approximate Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Vision-based Imitation Learning

In this work, we present a method for obtaining an implicit objective function for vision-based navigation. The proposed methodology relies on Imitation Learning, Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Deep Learning. We use Imitation Learning as a means to do Inverse Reinforcement Learning in order to create an approximate costmap generator for a visual navigation challenge. The resulting costmap is used in conjunction with a Model Predictive Controller for real-time control and outperforms other state-of-the-art costmap generators combined with MPC in novel environments. The proposed process allows for simple training and robustness to out-of-sample data. We apply our method to the task of vision-based autonomous driving in multiple real and simulated environments using the same weights for the costmap predictor in all environments.

Aggressive Perception-Aware Navigation using Deep Optical Flow Dynamics and PixelMPC

Recently, vision-based control has gained traction by leveraging the power of machine learning. In this work, we couple a model predictive control (MPC) framework to a visual pipeline. We introduce deep optical flow (DOF) dynamics, which is a combination of optical flow and robot dynamics. Using the DOF dynamics, MPC explicitly incorporates the predicted movement of relevant pixels into the planned trajectory of a robot. Our implementation of DOF is memory-efficient, data-efficient, and computationally cheap so that it can be computed in real-time for use in an MPC framework. The suggested Pixel Model Predictive Control (PixelMPC) algorithm controls the robot to accomplish a high-speed racing task while maintaining visibility of the important features (gates). This improves the reliability of vision-based estimators for localization and can eventually lead to safe autonomous flight. The proposed algorithm is tested in a photorealistic simulation with a high-speed drone racing task.