Autonomous Algorithm for Training Autonomous Vehicles with Minimal Human Intervention

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a compelling framework for enabling autonomous vehicles to continue to learn and improve diverse driving behaviors on their own. However, training real-world autonomous vehicles with current RL algorithms presents several challenges. One critical challenge, often overlooked in these algorithms, is the need to reset a driving environment between every episode. While resetting an environment after each episode is trivial in simulated settings, it demands significant human intervention in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a novel autonomous algorithm that allows off-the-shelf RL algorithms to train an autonomous vehicle with minimal human intervention. Our algorithm takes into account the learning progress of the autonomous vehicle to determine when to abort episodes before it enters unsafe states and where to reset it for subsequent episodes in order to gather informative transitions. The learning progress is estimated based on the novelty of both current and future states. We also take advantage of rule-based autonomous driving algorithms to safely reset an autonomous vehicle to an initial state. We evaluate our algorithm against baselines on diverse urban driving tasks. The experimental results show that our algorithm is task-agnostic and achieves better driving performance with fewer manual resets than baselines.