Quantitative Representation of Scenario Difficulty for Autonomous Driving Based on Adversarial Policy Search

Adversarial scenario generation is crucial for autonomous driving testing because it can efficiently simulate various challenge and complex traffic conditions. However, it is difficult to control current existing methods to generate desired scenarios, such as the ones with different conflict levels. Therefore, this paper proposes a data-driven quantitative method to represent scenario difficulty. Compared with rule-based discrete scenario difficulty representation method, the proposed algorithm can achieve continuous difficulty representation. Specifically, the environment agent is introduced, and a reinforcement learning method combined with mechanism knowledge is constructed for policy search to obtain an agent with adversarial behavior. The model parameters of the environment agent at different stages in the training process are extracted to construct a policy group, and then the agents with different adversarial intensity are obtained, which are used to realize data generation in different difficulty scenarios through the simulation environment. Finally, a data-driven scenario difficulty quantitative representation model is constructed, which is used to output the environment agent policy under different difficulties. The result analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can generate reasonable and interpretable scenarios with high discrimination, and can provide quantifiable difficulty representation without any expert logic rule design. The video link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GceGdqAm9Ys.

A Safe Self-evolution Algorithm for Autonomous Driving Based on Data-Driven Risk Quantification Model

Autonomous driving systems with self-evolution capabilities have the potential to independently evolve in complex and open environments, allowing to handle more unknown scenarios. However, as a result of the safety-performance trade-off mechanism of evolutionary algorithms, it is difficult to ensure safe exploration without sacrificing the improvement ability. This problem is especially prominent in dynamic traffic scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a safe self-evolution algorithm for autonomous driving based on data-driven risk quantification model. Specifically, a risk quantification model based on the attention mechanism is proposed by modeling the way humans perceive risks during driving, with the idea of achieving safety situation estimation of the surrounding environment through a data-driven approach. To prevent the impact of over-conservative safety guarding policies on the self-evolution capability of the algorithm, a safety-evolutionary decision-control integration algorithm with adjustable safety limits is proposed, and the proposed risk quantization model is integrated into it. Simulation and real-vehicle experiments results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed algorithm can generate safe and reasonable actions in a variety of complex scenarios and guarantee safety without losing the evolutionary potential of learning-based autonomous driving systems.

A Safety-Oriented Self-Learning Algorithm for Autonomous Driving: Evolution Starting from a Basic Model

Autonomous driving vehicles with self-learning capabilities are expected to evolve in complex environments to improve their ability to cope with different scenarios. However, most self-learning algorithms suffer from low learning efficiency and lacking safety, which limits their applications. This paper proposes a safety-oriented self-learning algorithm for autonomous driving, which focuses on how to achieve evolution from a basic model. Specifically, a basic model based on the transformer encoder is designed to extract and output policy features from a small number of demonstration trajectories. To improve the learning efficiency, a policy mixed approach is developed. The basic model provides initial values to improve exploration efficiency, and the self-learning algorithm enhances the adaptability and generalization of the model, enabling continuous improvement without external intervention. Finally, an actor approximator based on receding horizon optimization is designed considering the constraints of the environmental input to ensure safety. The proposed method is verified in a challenging mixed traffic environment with pedestrians and vehicles. Simulation and real-vehicle test results show that the proposed method can safely and efficiently learn appropriate autonomous driving behaviors. Compared reinforcement learning and behavior cloning methods, it can achieve comprehensive improvement in learning efficiency and performance under the premise of ensuring safety.

A Safe and Efficient Self-evolving Algorithm for Decision-making and Control of Autonomous Driving Systems

Autonomous vehicles with a self-evolving ability are expected to cope with unknown scenarios in the real-world environment. Take advantage of trial and error mechanism, reinforcement learning is able to self evolve by learning the optimal policy, and it is particularly well suitable for solving decision-making problems. However, reinforcement learning suffers from safety issues and low learning efficiency, especially in the continuous action space. Therefore, the motivation of this paper is to address the above problem by proposing a hybrid Mechanism-Experience-Learning augmented approach. Specifically, to realize the efficient self-evolution, the driving tendency by analogy with human driving experience is proposed to reduce the search space of the autonomous driving problem, while the constrained optimization problem based on a mechanistic model is designed to ensure safety during the self-evolving process. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of generating safe and reasonable actions in various complex scenarios, improving the performance of the autonomous driving system. Compared to conventional reinforcement learning, the safety and efficiency of the proposed algorithm are greatly improved. The training process is collision-free, and the training time is equivalent to less than 10 minutes in the real world.

Joint Sparse Representations and Coupled Dictionary Learning in Multi-Source Heterogeneous Image Pseudo-color Fusion

Considering that Coupled Dictionary Learning (CDL) method can obtain a reasonable linear mathematical relationship between resource images, we propose a novel CDL-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral pseudo-color fusion method. Firstly, the traditional Brovey transform is employed as a pre-processing method on the paired SAR and multispectral images. Then, CDL is used to capture the correlation between the pre-processed image pairs based on the dictionaries generated from the source images via enforced joint sparse coding. Afterward, the joint sparse representation in the pair of dictionaries is utilized to construct an image mask via calculating the reconstruction errors, and therefore generate the final fusion image. The experimental verification results of the SAR images from the Sentinel-1 satellite and the multispectral images from the Landsat-8 satellite show that the proposed method can achieve superior visual effects, and excellent quantitative performance in terms of spectral distortion, correlation coefficient, MSE, NIQE, BRISQUE, and PIQE.

A Systematic Survey of Control Techniques and Applications: From Autonomous Vehicles to Connected and Automated Vehicles

Vehicle control is one of the most critical challenges in autonomous vehicles (AVs) and connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), and it is paramount in vehicle safety, passenger comfort, transportation efficiency, and energy saving. This survey attempts to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the current state of vehicle control technology, focusing on the evolution from vehicle state estimation and trajectory tracking control in AVs at the microscopic level to collaborative control in CAVs at the macroscopic level. First, this review starts with vehicle key state estimation, specifically vehicle sideslip angle, which is the most pivotal state for vehicle trajectory control, to discuss representative approaches. Then, we present symbolic vehicle trajectory tracking control approaches for AVs. On top of that, we further review the collaborative control frameworks for CAVs and corresponding applications. Finally, this survey concludes with a discussion of future research directions and the challenges. This survey aims to provide a contextualized and in-depth look at state of the art in vehicle control for AVs and CAVs, identifying critical areas of focus and pointing out the potential areas for further exploration.

Hierarchical Graph Pooling is an Effective Citywide Traffic Condition Prediction Model

Accurate traffic conditions prediction provides a solid foundation for vehicle-environment coordination and traffic control tasks. Because of the complexity of road network data in spatial distribution and the diversity of deep learning methods, it becomes challenging to effectively define traffic data and adequately capture the complex spatial nonlinear features in the data. This paper applies two hierarchical graph pooling approaches to the traffic prediction task to reduce graph information redundancy. First, this paper verifies the effectiveness of hierarchical graph pooling methods in traffic prediction tasks. The hierarchical graph pooling methods are contrasted with the other baselines on predictive performance. Second, two mainstream hierarchical graph pooling methods, node clustering pooling and node drop pooling, are applied to analyze advantages and weaknesses in traffic prediction. Finally, for the mentioned graph neural networks, this paper compares the predictive effects of different graph network inputs on traffic prediction accuracy. The efficient ways of defining graph networks are analyzed and summarized.

Transfer Learning and Vision Transformer based State-of-Health prediction of Lithium-Ion Batteries

In recent years, significant progress has been made in transportation electrification. And lithium-ion batteries (LIB), as the main energy storage devices, have received widespread attention. Accurately predicting the state of health (SOH) can not only ease the anxiety of users about the battery life but also provide important information for the management of the battery. This paper presents a prediction method for SOH based on Vision Transformer (ViT) model. First, discrete charging data of a predefined voltage range is used as an input data matrix. Then, the cycle features of the battery are captured by the ViT which can obtain the global features, and the SOH is obtained by combining the cycle features with the full connection (FC) layer. At the same time, transfer learning (TL) is introduced, and the prediction model based on source task battery training is further fine-tuned according to the early cycle data of the target task battery to provide an accurate prediction. Experiments show that our method can obtain better feature expression compared with existing deep learning methods so that better prediction effect and transfer effect can be achieved.

Spatial-Temporal Feature Extraction and Evaluation Network for Citywide Traffic Condition Prediction

Traffic prediction plays an important role in the realization of traffic control and scheduling tasks in intelligent transportation systems. With the diversification of data sources, reasonably using rich traffic data to model the complex spatial-temporal dependence and nonlinear characteristics in traffic flow are the key challenge for intelligent transportation system. In addition, clearly evaluating the importance of spatial-temporal features extracted from different data becomes a challenge. A Double Layer - Spatial Temporal Feature Extraction and Evaluation (DL-STFEE) model is proposed. The lower layer of DL-STFEE is spatial-temporal feature extraction layer. The spatial and temporal features in traffic data are extracted by multi-graph graph convolution and attention mechanism, and different combinations of spatial and temporal features are generated. The upper layer of DL-STFEE is the spatial-temporal feature evaluation layer. Through the attention score matrix generated by the high-dimensional self-attention mechanism, the spatial-temporal features combinations are fused and evaluated, so as to get the impact of different combinations on prediction effect. Three sets of experiments are performed on actual traffic datasets to show that DL-STFEE can effectively capture the spatial-temporal features and evaluate the importance of different spatial-temporal feature combinations.

A Transferable Intersection Reconstruction Network for Traffic Speed Prediction

Traffic speed prediction is the key to many valuable applications, and it is also a challenging task because of its various influencing factors. Recent work attempts to obtain more information through various hybrid models, thereby improving the prediction accuracy. However, the spatial information acquisition schemes of these methods have two-level differentiation problems. Either the modeling is simple but contains little spatial information, or the modeling is complete but lacks flexibility. In order to introduce more spatial information on the basis of ensuring flexibility, this paper proposes IRNet (Transferable Intersection Reconstruction Network). First, this paper reconstructs the intersection into a virtual intersection with the same structure, which simplifies the topology of the road network. Then, the spatial information is subdivided into intersection information and sequence information of traffic flow direction, and spatiotemporal features are obtained through various models. Third, a self-attention mechanism is used to fuse spatiotemporal features for prediction. In the comparison experiment with the baseline, not only the prediction effect, but also the transfer performance has obvious advantages.