Uncertainty-Aware DRL for Autonomous Vehicle Crowd Navigation in Shared Space
Safe, socially compliant, and efficient navigation of low-speed autonomous vehicles (AVs) in pedestrian-rich environments necessitates considering pedestrians' future positions and interactions with the vehicle and others. Despite the inevitable uncertainties associated with pedestrians' predicted trajectories due to their unobserved states (e.g., intent), existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms for crowd navigation often neglect these uncertainties when using predicted trajectories to guide policy learning. This omission limits the usability of predictions when diverging from ground truth. This work introduces an integrated prediction and planning approach that incorporates the uncertainties of predicted pedestrian states in the training of a model-free DRL algorithm. A novel reward function encourages the AV to respect pedestrians' personal space, decrease speed during close approaches, and minimize the collision probability with their predicted paths. Unlike previous DRL methods, our model, designed for AV operation in crowded spaces, is trained in a novel simulation environment that reflects realistic pedestrian behaviour in a shared space with vehicles. Results show a 40% decrease in collision rate and a 15% increase in minimum distance to pedestrians compared to the state of the art model that does not account for prediction uncertainty. Additionally, the approach outperforms model predictive control methods that incorporate the same prediction uncertainties in terms of both performance and computational time, while producing trajectories closer to human drivers in similar scenarios.
Code (1)
Tasks
Autonomous VehiclesDeep Reinforcement LearningModel Predictive ControlMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Pedestrian-Robot Interactions on Autonomous Crowd Navigation: Reactive Control Methods and Evaluation Metrics
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a cr…
Autonomous NavigationBelief Aided Navigation using Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Avoiding Humans in Blind Spots
Recent research on mobile robot navigation has focused on socially aware navigation in crowded environments. However, existing methods do not adequately account for human robot interactions and demand accurate location i…
Autonomous VehiclesNavigateRobot NavigationAttentional-GCNN: Adaptive Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction towards Generic Autonomous Vehicle Use Cases
Autonomous vehicle navigation in shared pedestrian environments requires the ability to predict future crowd motion both accurately and with minimal delay. Understanding the uncertainty of the prediction is also crucial.…
motion predictionPedestrian Trajectory PredictionTrajectory PredictionSafe Navigation in Unstructured Environments by Minimizing Uncertainty in Control and Perception
Uncertainty in control and perception poses challenges for autonomous vehicle navigation in unstructured environments, leading to navigation failures and potential vehicle damage. This paper introduces a framework that m…
Meta-LearningPredictionInformation-Aware Guidance for Magnetic Anomaly based Navigation
In the absence of an absolute positioning system, such as GPS, autonomous vehicles are subject to accumulation of positional error which can interfere with reliable performance. Improved navigational accuracy without GPS…
Autonomous VehiclesDecision Making