Integrating End-to-End and Modular Driving Approaches for Online Corner Case Detection in Autonomous Driving

Online corner case detection is crucial for ensuring safety in autonomous driving vehicles. Current autonomous driving approaches can be categorized into modular approaches and end-to-end approaches. To leverage the advantages of both, we propose a method for online corner case detection that integrates an end-to-end approach into a modular system. The modular system takes over the primary driving task and the end-to-end network runs in parallel as a secondary one, the disagreement between the systems is then used for corner case detection. We implement this method on a real vehicle and evaluate it qualitatively. Our results demonstrate that end-to-end networks, known for their superior situational awareness, as secondary driving systems, can effectively contribute to corner case detection. These findings suggest that such an approach holds potential for enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles.

Reinforcement Learning for Solving Robotic Reaching Tasks in the Neurorobotics Platform

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential for solving tasks in well-defined environments like games or robotics. This paper aims to solve the robotic reaching task in a simulation run on the Neurorobotics Platform (NRP). The target position is initialized randomly and the robot has 6 degrees of freedom. We compare the performance of various state-of-the-art model-free algorithms. At first, the agent is trained on ground truth data from the simulation to reach the target position in only one continuous movement. Later the complexity of the task is increased by using image data as input from the simulation environment. Experimental results show that training efficiency and results can be improved with appropriate dynamic training schedule function for curriculum learning.