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Emergent-scene safety is the key milestone for fully autonomous driving, and reliable on-time prediction is essential to maintain safety in emergency scenarios. However, these emergency scenarios are long-tailed and hard to collect, which restricts the system from getting reliable predictions. In this paper, we build a new dataset, which aims at the long-term prediction with the inconspicuous state variation in history for the emergency event, named the Extro-Spective Prediction (ESP) problem. Based on the proposed dataset, a flexible feature encoder for ESP is introduced to various prediction methods as a seamless plug-in, and its consistent performance improvement underscores its efficacy. Furthermore, a new metric named clamped temporal error (CTE) is proposed to give a more comprehensive evaluation of prediction performance, especially in time-sensitive emergency events of subseconds. Interestingly, as our ESP features can be described in human-readable language naturally, the application of integrating into ChatGPT also shows huge potential. The ESP-dataset and all benchmarks are released at https://dingrui-wang.github.io/ESP-Dataset/., Comment: Accepted by ICRA 2024 as Oral Presentation

This research aims to investigate professional racing drivers' expertise to develop an understanding of their cognitive and adaptive skills to create new autonomy algorithms. An expert interview study was conducted with 11 professional race drivers, data analysts, and racing instructors from across prominent racing leagues. The interviews were conducted using an exploratory, non-standardized expert interview format guided by a set of prepared questions. The study investigates drivers' exploration strategies to reach their vehicle limits and contrasts them with the capabilities of state-of-the-art autonomous racing software stacks. Participants were questioned about the techniques and skills they have developed to quickly approach and maneuver at the vehicle limit, ultimately minimizing lap times. The analysis of the interviews was grounded in Mayring's qualitative content analysis framework, which facilitated the organization of the data into multiple categories and subcategories. Our findings create insights into human behavior regarding reaching a vehicle's limit and minimizing lap times. We conclude from the findings the development of new autonomy software modules that allow for more adaptive vehicle behavior. By emphasizing the distinct nuances between manual and autonomous driving techniques, the paper encourages further investigation into human drivers' strategies to maximize their vehicles' capabilities., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between operational design domains (ODD), automated driving SAE Levels, and Technology Readiness Level (TRL). The first highly automated vehicles, like robotaxis, are in commercial use, and the first vehicles with highway pilot systems have been delivered to private customers. It has emerged as a crucial issue that these automated driving systems differ significantly in their ODD and in their technical maturity. Consequently, any approach to compare these systems is difficult and requires a deep dive into defined ODDs, specifications, and technologies used. Therefore, this paper challenges current state-of-the-art taxonomies and develops a new and integrated taxonomy that can structure automated vehicle systems more efficiently. We use the well-known SAE Levels 0-5 as the "level of responsibility", and link and describe the ODD at an intermediate level of abstraction. Finally, a new maturity model is explicitly proposed to improve the comparability of automated vehicles and driving functions. This method is then used to analyze today's existing automated vehicle applications, which are structured into the new taxonomy and rated by the new maturity levels. Our results indicate that this new taxonomy and maturity level model will help to differentiate automated vehicle systems in discussions more clearly and to discover white fields more systematically and upfront, e.g. for research but also for regulatory purposes.

The automotive industry is transitioning from traditional ECU-based systems to software-defined vehicles. A central role of this revolution is played by containers, lightweight virtualization technologies that enable the flexible consolidation of complex software applications on a common hardware platform. Despite their widespread adoption, the impact of containerization on fundamental real-time metrics such as end-to-end latency, communication jitter, as well as memory and CPU utilization has remained virtually unexplored. This paper presents a microservice architecture for a real-world autonomous driving application where containers isolate each service. Our comprehensive evaluation shows the benefits in terms of end-to-end latency of such a solution even over standard bare-Linux deployments. Specifically, in the case of the presented microservice architecture, the mean end-to-end latency can be improved by 5-8 %. Also, the maximum latencies were significantly reduced using container deployment.

Today's software stacks for autonomous vehicles rely on HD maps to enable sufficient localization, accurate path planning, and reliable motion prediction. Recent developments have resulted in pipelines for the automated generation of HD maps to reduce manual efforts for creating and updating these HD maps. We present FlexMap Fusion, a methodology to automatically update and enhance existing HD vector maps using OpenStreetMap. Our approach is designed to enable the use of HD maps created from LiDAR and camera data within Autoware. The pipeline provides different functionalities: It provides the possibility to georeference both the point cloud map and the vector map using an RTK-corrected GNSS signal. Moreover, missing semantic attributes can be conflated from OpenStreetMap into the vector map. Differences between the HD map and OpenStreetMap are visualized for manual refinement by the user. In general, our findings indicate that our approach leads to reduced human labor during HD map generation, increases the scalability of the mapping pipeline, and improves the completeness and usability of the maps. The methodological choices may have resulted in limitations that arise especially at complex street structures, e.g., traffic islands. Therefore, more research is necessary to create efficient preprocessing algorithms and advancements in the dynamic adjustment of matching parameters. In order to build upon our work, our source code is available at https://github.com/TUMFTM/FlexMap_Fusion., Comment: 7 pages

The F1TENTH autonomous driving platform, consisting of 1:10-scale remote-controlled cars, has evolved into a well-established education and research platform. The many publications and real-world competitions span many domains, from classical path planning to novel learning-based algorithms. Consequently, the field is wide and disjointed, hindering direct comparison of developed methods and making it difficult to assess the state-of-the-art. Therefore, we aim to unify the field by surveying current approaches, describing common methods, and providing benchmark results to facilitate clear comparisons and establish a baseline for future work. This research aims to survey past and current work with F1TENTH vehicles in the classical and learning categories and explain the different solution approaches. We describe particle filter localisation, trajectory optimisation and tracking, model predictive contouring control, follow-the-gap, and end-to-end reinforcement learning. We provide an open-source evaluation of benchmark methods and investigate overlooked factors of control frequency and localisation accuracy for classical methods as well as reward signal and training map for learning methods. The evaluation shows that the optimisation and tracking method achieves the fastest lap times, followed by the online planning approach. Finally, our work identifies and outlines the relevant research aspects to help motivate future work in the F1TENTH domain., Comment: 12 pages, 18 figures. Sumbitted for publication

Current validation methods often rely on recorded data and basic functional checks, which may not be sufficient to encompass the scenarios an autonomous vehicle might encounter. In addition, there is a growing need for complex scenarios with changing vehicle interactions for comprehensive validation. This work introduces a novel synchronous multi-agent simulation framework for autonomous vehicles in interactive scenarios. Our approach creates an interactive scenario and incorporates publicly available edge-case scenarios wherein simulated vehicles are replaced by agents navigating to predefined destinations. We provide a platform that enables the integration of different autonomous driving planning methodologies and includes a set of evaluation metrics to assess autonomous driving behavior. Our study explores different planning setups and adjusts simulation complexity to test the framework's adaptability and performance. Results highlight the critical role of simulating vehicle interactions to enhance autonomous driving systems. Our setup offers unique insights for developing advanced algorithms for complex driving tasks to accelerate future investigations and developments in this field. The multi-agent simulation framework is available as open-source software: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/Frenetix-Motion-Planner, Comment: 8 Pages. Submitted to IEEE IV 2024 Korea Conference

Determining the optimal cost function parameters of Model Predictive Control (MPC) to optimize multiple control objectives is a challenging and time-consuming task. Multiobjective Bayesian Optimization (BO) techniques solve this problem by determining a Pareto optimal parameter set for an MPC with static weights. However, a single parameter set may not deliver the most optimal closed-loop control performance when the context of the MPC operating conditions changes during its operation, urging the need to adapt the cost function weights at runtime. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can automatically learn context-dependent optimal parameter sets and dynamically adapt for a Weightsvarying MPC (WMPC). However, learning cost function weights from scratch in a continuous action space may lead to unsafe operating states. To solve this, we propose a novel approach limiting the RL actions within a safe learning space representing a catalog of pre-optimized BO Pareto-optimal weight sets. We conceive a RL agent not to learn in a continuous space but to proactively anticipate upcoming control tasks and to choose the most optimal discrete actions, each corresponding to a single set of Pareto optimal weights, context-dependent. Hence, even an untrained RL agent guarantees a safe and optimal performance. Experimental results demonstrate that an untrained RL-WMPC shows Pareto-optimal closed-loop behavior and training the RL-WMPC helps exhibit a performance beyond the Pareto-front.

Interaction-aware trajectory planning is crucial for closing the gap between autonomous racing cars and human racing drivers. Prior work has applied game theory as it provides equilibrium concepts for non-cooperative dynamic problems. With this contribution, we formulate racing as a dynamic game and employ a variant of iLQR, called iLQGames, to solve the game. iLQGames finds trajectories for all players that satisfy the equilibrium conditions for a linear-quadratic approximation of the game and has been previously applied in traffic scenarios. We analyze the algorithm's applicability for trajectory planning in racing scenarios and evaluate it based on interaction awareness, competitiveness, and safety. With the ability of iLQGames to solve for open-loop and feedback Nash equilibria, we compare the behavioral outcomes of the two equilibrium concepts in simple scenarios on a straight track section., Comment: 8 pages, submitted to be published at the 35th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, June 2 - 5, 2024, Jeju Shinhwa World, Jeju Island, Korea

Our work introduces a module for assessing the trajectory safety of autonomous vehicles in dynamic environments marked by high uncertainty. We focus on occluded areas and occluded traffic participants with limited information about surrounding obstacles. To address this problem, we propose a software module that handles blind spots (BS) created by static and dynamic obstacles in urban environments. We identify potential occluded traffic participants, predict their movement, and assess the ego vehicle's trajectory using various criticality metrics. The method offers a straightforward and modular integration into motion planner algorithms. We present critical real-world scenarios to evaluate our module and apply our approach to a publicly available trajectory planning algorithm. Our results demonstrate that safe yet efficient driving with occluded road users can be achieved by incorporating safety assessments into the planning process. The code used in this research is publicly available as open-source software and can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/Frenetix-Occlusion., Comment: 8 Pages. Submitted to IEEE IV Conference, Korea

This study introduces a novel approach to autonomous motion planning, informing an analytical algorithm with a reinforcement learning (RL) agent within a Frenet coordinate system. The combination directly addresses the challenges of adaptability and safety in autonomous driving. Motion planning algorithms are essential for navigating dynamic and complex scenarios. Traditional methods, however, lack the flexibility required for unpredictable environments, whereas machine learning techniques, particularly reinforcement learning (RL), offer adaptability but suffer from instability and a lack of explainability. Our unique solution synergizes the predictability and stability of traditional motion planning algorithms with the dynamic adaptability of RL, resulting in a system that efficiently manages complex situations and adapts to changing environmental conditions. Evaluation of our integrated approach shows a significant reduction in collisions, improved risk management, and improved goal success rates across multiple scenarios. The code used in this research is publicly available as open-source software and can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/Frenetix-RL., Comment: 8 Pages. Submitted in Conference IEEE IV 2024 Korea

Our research introduces a modular motion planning framework for autonomous vehicles using a sampling-based trajectory planning algorithm. This approach effectively tackles the challenges of solution space construction and optimization in path planning. The algorithm is applicable to both real vehicles and simulations, offering a robust solution for complex autonomous navigation. Our method employs a multi-objective optimization strategy for efficient navigation in static and highly dynamic environments, focusing on optimizing trajectory comfort, safety, and path precision. The algorithm is used to analyze the algorithm performance and success rate in 1750 virtual complex urban and highway scenarios. Our results demonstrate fast calculation times (8ms for 800 trajectories), a high success rate in complex scenarios (88%), and easy adaptability with different modules presented. The most noticeable difference exhibited was the fast trajectory sampling, feasibility check, and cost evaluation step across various trajectory counts. We demonstrate the integration and execution of the framework on real vehicles by evaluating deviations from the controller using a test track. This evaluation highlights the algorithm's robustness and reliability, ensuring it meets the stringent requirements of real-world autonomous driving scenarios. The code and the additional modules used in this research are publicly available as open-source software and can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/Frenetix-Motion-Planner., Comment: Submitted to IEEE ACCESS

In this paper, we present a novel Reduced Robustified NMPC (R$^2$NMPC) algorithm that has the same complexity as an equivalent nominal NMPC while enhancing it with robustified constraints based on the dynamics of ellipsoidal uncertainty sets. This promises both a closed-loop- and constraint satisfaction performance equivalent to common Robustified NMPC approaches, while drastically reducing the computational complexity. The main idea lies in approximating the ellipsoidal uncertainty sets propagation over the prediction horizon with the system dynamics' sensitivities inferred from the last optimal control problem (OCP) solution, and similarly for the gradients to robustify the constraints. Thus, we do not require the decision variables related to the uncertainty propagation within the OCP, rendering it computationally tractable. Next, we illustrate the real-time control capabilities of our algorithm in handling a complex, high-dimensional, and highly nonlinear system, namely the trajectory following of an autonomous passenger vehicle modeled with a dynamic nonlinear single-track model. Our experimental findings, alongside a comparative assessment against other Robust NMPC approaches, affirm the robustness of our method in effectively tracking an optimal racetrack trajectory while satisfying the nonlinear constraints. This performance is achieved while fully utilizing the vehicle's interface limits, even at high speeds of up to 37.5m/s, and successfully managing state estimation disturbances. Remarkably, our approach maintains a mean solving frequency of 144Hz.

In this paper, we present a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven Adaptive Stochastic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (SNMPC) to optimize uncertainty handling, constraints robustification, feasibility, and closed-loop performance. To this end, we conceive an RL agent to proactively anticipate upcoming control tasks and to dynamically determine the most suitable combination of key SNMPC parameters - foremost the robustification factor $\kappa$ and the Uncertainty Propagation Horizon (UPH) $T_u$. We analyze the trained RL agent's decision-making process and highlight its ability to learn context-dependent optimal parameters. One key finding is that adapting the constraints robustification factor with the learned policy reduces conservatism and improves closed-loop performance while adapting UPH renders previously infeasible SNMPC problems feasible when faced with severe disturbances. We showcase the enhanced robustness and feasibility of our Adaptive SNMPC (aSNMPC) through the real-time motion control task of an autonomous passenger vehicle to follow an optimal race line when confronted with significant time-variant disturbances. Experimental findings demonstrate that our look-ahead RL-driven aSNMPC outperforms its Static SNMPC (sSNMPC) counterpart in minimizing the lateral deviation both with accurate and inaccurate disturbance assumptions and even when driving in previously unexplored environments.

Autonomous vehicles require accurate and robust localization and mapping algorithms to navigate safely and reliably in urban environments. We present a novel sensor fusion-based pipeline for offline mapping and online localization based on LiDAR sensors. The proposed approach leverages four LiDAR sensors. Mapping and localization algorithms are based on the KISS-ICP, enabling real-time performance and high accuracy. We introduce an approach to generate semantic maps for driving tasks such as path planning. The presented pipeline is integrated into the ROS 2 based Autoware software stack, providing a robust and flexible environment for autonomous driving applications. We show that our pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for a given research vehicle and real-world autonomous driving application., Comment: Accepted and presented at IEEE Sensors Conference 2023

Employing Stochastic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (SNMPC) for real-time applications is challenging due to the complex task of propagating uncertainties through nonlinear systems. This difficulty becomes more pronounced in high-dimensional systems with extended prediction horizons, such as autonomous vehicles. To enhance closed-loop performance in and feasibility in SNMPCs, we introduce the concept of the Uncertainty Propagation Horizon (UPH). The UPH limits the time for uncertainty propagation through system dynamics, preventing trajectory divergence, optimizing feedback loop advantages, and reducing computational overhead. Our SNMPC approach utilizes Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) to propagate uncertainties and incorporates nonlinear hard constraints on state expectations and nonlinear probabilistic constraints. We transform the probabilistic constraints into deterministic constraints by estimating the nonlinear constraints' expectation and variance. We then showcase our algorithm's effectiveness in real-time control of a high-dimensional, highly nonlinear system-the trajectory following of an autonomous passenger vehicle, modeled with a dynamic nonlinear single-track model. Experimental results demonstrate our approach's robust capability to follow an optimal racetrack trajectory at speeds of up to 37.5m/s while dealing with state estimation disturbances, achieving a minimum solving frequency of 97Hz. Additionally, our experiments illustrate that limiting the UPH renders previously infeasible SNMPC problems feasible, even when incorrect uncertainty assumptions or strong disturbances are present.

While current research and development of autonomous driving primarily focuses on developing new features and algorithms, the transfer from isolated software components into an entire software stack has been covered sparsely. Besides that, due to the complexity of autonomous software stacks and public road traffic, the optimal validation of entire stacks is an open research problem. Our paper targets these two aspects. We present our autonomous research vehicle EDGAR and its digital twin, a detailed virtual duplication of the vehicle. While the vehicle's setup is closely related to the state of the art, its virtual duplication is a valuable contribution as it is crucial for a consistent validation process from simulation to real-world tests. In addition, different development teams can work with the same model, making integration and testing of the software stacks much easier, significantly accelerating the development process. The real and virtual vehicles are embedded in a comprehensive development environment, which is also introduced. All parameters of the digital twin are provided open-source at https://github.com/TUMFTM/edgar_digital_twin.

Autonomous vehicles demand high accuracy and robustness of perception algorithms. To develop efficient and scalable perception algorithms, the maximum information should be extracted from the available sensor data. In this work, we present our concept for an end-to-end perception architecture, named DeepSTEP. The deep learning-based architecture processes raw sensor data from the camera, LiDAR, and RaDAR, and combines the extracted data in a deep fusion network. The output of this deep fusion network is a shared feature space, which is used by perception head networks to fulfill several perception tasks, such as object detection or local mapping. DeepSTEP incorporates multiple ideas to advance state of the art: First, combining detection and localization into a single pipeline allows for efficient processing to reduce computational overhead and further improves overall performance. Second, the architecture leverages the temporal domain by using a self-attention mechanism that focuses on the most important features. We believe that our concept of DeepSTEP will advance the development of end-to-end perception systems. The network will be deployed on our research vehicle, which will be used as a platform for data collection, real-world testing, and validation. In conclusion, DeepSTEP represents a significant advancement in the field of perception for autonomous vehicles. The architecture's end-to-end design, time-aware attention mechanism, and integration of multiple perception tasks make it a promising solution for real-world deployment. This research is a work in progress and presents the first concept of establishing a novel perception pipeline., Comment: Accepted to be published as part of the 5th Workshop on 3D-Deep Learning for Automated Driving on the 34th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Anchorage, Alaska, USA, June 4-7, 2023

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being rapidly introduced into our lives. However, public misunderstanding and mistrust have become prominent issues hindering the acceptance of these driverless technologies. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a driving simulator to help the public gain an understanding of AVs and build trust in them. To achieve this aim, we built an integrated simulation platform, designed various driving scenarios, and recruited 28 participants for the experiment. The study results indicate that a driving simulator effectively decreases the participants' perceived risk of AVs and increases perceived usefulness. The proposed methodologies and findings of this study can be further explored by auto manufacturers and policymakers to provide user-friendly AV design.

In this paper, we present a novel method for integrating 3D LiDAR depth measurements into the existing ORB-SLAM3 by building upon the RGB-D mode. We propose and compare two methods of depth map generation: conventional computer vision methods, namely an inverse dilation operation, and a supervised deep learning-based approach. We integrate the former directly into the ORB-SLAM3 framework by adding a so-called RGB-L (LiDAR) mode that directly reads LiDAR point clouds. The proposed methods are evaluated on the KITTI Odometry dataset and compared to each other and the standard ORB-SLAM3 stereo method. We demonstrate that, depending on the environment, advantages in trajectory accuracy and robustness can be achieved. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the runtime of the ORB-SLAM3 algorithm can be reduced by more than 40 % compared to the stereo mode. The related code for the ORB-SLAM3 RGB-L mode will be available as open-source software under https://github.com/TUMFTM/ORB SLAM3 RGBL., Comment: Accepted at ICCCR 2023

Autonomous racing with scaled race cars has gained increasing attention as an effective approach for developing perception, planning and control algorithms for safe autonomous driving at the limits of the vehicle's handling. To train agile control policies for autonomous racing, learning-based approaches largely utilize reinforcement learning, albeit with mixed results. In this study, we benchmark a variety of imitation learning policies for racing vehicles that are applied directly or for bootstrapping reinforcement learning both in simulation and on scaled real-world environments. We show that interactive imitation learning techniques outperform traditional imitation learning methods and can greatly improve the performance of reinforcement learning policies by bootstrapping thanks to its better sample efficiency. Our benchmarks provide a foundation for future research on autonomous racing using Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

Robot localization is an inverse problem of finding a robot's pose using a map and sensor measurements. In recent years, Invertible Neural Networks (INNs) have successfully solved ambiguous inverse problems in various fields. This paper proposes a framework that solves the localization problem with INN. We design an INN that provides implicit map representation in the forward path and localization in the inverse path. By sampling the latent space in evaluation, Local\_INN outputs robot poses with covariance, which can be used to estimate the uncertainty. We show that the localization performance of Local\_INN is on par with current methods with much lower latency. We show detailed 2D and 3D map reconstruction from Local\_INN using poses exterior to the training set. We also provide a global localization algorithm using Local\_INN to tackle the kidnapping problem.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising method to learn control policies for robots only from demonstration and experience. To cover the whole dynamic behaviour of the robot, DRL training is an active exploration process typically performed in simulation environments. Although this simulation training is cheap and fast, applying DRL algorithms to real-world settings is difficult. If agents are trained until they perform safely in simulation, transferring them to physical systems is difficult due to the sim-to-real gap caused by the difference between the simulation dynamics and the physical robot. In this paper, we present a method of online training a DRL agent to drive autonomously on a physical vehicle by using a model-based safety supervisor. Our solution uses a supervisory system to check if the action selected by the agent is safe or unsafe and ensure that a safe action is always implemented on the vehicle. With this, we can bypass the sim-to-real problem while training the DRL algorithm safely, quickly, and efficiently. We compare our method with conventional learning in simulation and on a physical vehicle. We provide a variety of real-world experiments where we train online a small-scale vehicle to drive autonomously with no prior simulation training. The evaluation results show that our method trains agents with improved sample efficiency while never crashing, and the trained agents demonstrate better driving performance than those trained in simulation., Comment: 7 Pages, 10 Figures, 1 Table

Although robotics courses are well established in higher education, the courses often focus on theory and sometimes lack the systematic coverage of the techniques involved in developing, deploying, and applying software to real hardware. Additionally, most hardware platforms for robotics teaching are low-level toys aimed at younger students at middle-school levels. To address this gap, an autonomous vehicle hardware platform, called F1TENTH, is developed for teaching autonomous systems hands-on. This article describes the teaching modules and software stack for teaching at various educational levels with the theme of "racing" and competitions that replace exams. The F1TENTH vehicles offer a modular hardware platform and its related software for teaching the fundamentals of autonomous driving algorithms. From basic reactive methods to advanced planning algorithms, the teaching modules enhance students' computational thinking through autonomous driving with the F1TENTH vehicle. The F1TENTH car fills the gap between research platforms and low-end toy cars and offers hands-on experience in learning the topics in autonomous systems. Four universities have adopted the teaching modules for their semester-long undergraduate and graduate courses for multiple years. Student feedback is used to analyze the effectiveness of the F1TENTH platform. More than 80% of the students strongly agree that the hardware platform and modules greatly motivate their learning, and more than 70% of the students strongly agree that the hardware-enhanced their understanding of the subjects. The survey results show that more than 80% of the students strongly agree that the competitions motivate them for the course., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables

Generating competitive strategies and performing continuous motion planning simultaneously in an adversarial setting is a challenging problem. In addition, understanding the intent of other agents is crucial to deploying autonomous systems in adversarial multi-agent environments. Existing approaches either discretize agent action by grouping similar control inputs, sacrificing performance in motion planning, or plan in uninterpretable latent spaces, producing hard-to-understand agent behaviors. Furthermore, the most popular policy optimization frameworks do not recognize the long-term effect of actions and become myopic. This paper proposes an agent action discretization method via abstraction that provides clear intentions of agent actions, an efficient offline pipeline of agent population synthesis, and a planning strategy using counterfactual regret minimization with function approximation. Finally, we experimentally validate our findings on scaled autonomous vehicles in a head-to-head racing setting. We demonstrate that using the proposed framework significantly improves learning, improves the win rate against different opponents, and the improvements can be transferred to unseen opponents in an unseen environment., Comment: Submitted to 2024 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2024)

The 3rd Japan Automotive AI Challenge was an international online autonomous racing challenge where 164 teams competed in December 2021. This paper outlines the winning strategy to this competition, and the advantages and challenges of using the Autoware.Auto open source autonomous driving platform for multi-agent racing. Our winning approach includes a lane-switching opponent overtaking strategy, a global raceline optimization, and the integration of various tools from Autoware.Auto including a Model-Predictive Controller. We describe the use of perception, planning and control modules for high-speed racing applications and provide experience-based insights on working with Autoware.Auto. While our approach is a rule-based strategy that is suitable for non-interactive opponents, it provides a good reference and benchmark for learning-enabled approaches., Comment: Accepted at Autoware Workshop at IV 2022

For decades, motorsport has been an incubator for innovations in the automotive sector and brought forth systems like disk brakes or rearview mirrors. Autonomous racing series such as Roborace, F1Tenth, or the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) are envisioned as playing a similar role within the autonomous vehicle sector, serving as a proving ground for new technology at the limits of the autonomous systems capabilities. This paper outlines the software stack and approach of the TUM Autonomous Motorsport team for their participation in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, which holds two competitions: A single-vehicle competition on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a passing competition at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Nine university teams used an identical vehicle platform: A modified Indy Lights chassis equipped with sensors, a computing platform, and actuators. All the teams developed different algorithms for object detection, localization, planning, prediction, and control of the race cars. The team from TUM placed first in Indianapolis and secured second place in Las Vegas. During the final of the passing competition, the TUM team reached speeds and accelerations close to the limit of the vehicle, peaking at around 270 km/h and 28 ms2. This paper will present details of the vehicle hardware platform, the developed algorithms, and the workflow to test and enhance the software applied during the two-year project. We derive deep insights into the autonomous vehicle's behavior at high speed and high acceleration by providing a detailed competition analysis. Based on this, we deduce a list of lessons learned and provide insights on promising areas of future work based on the real-world evaluation of the displayed concepts., Comment: 37 pages, 18 figures, 2 tables

Autonomous systems are composed of several subsystems such as mechanical, propulsion, perception, planning and control. These are traditionally designed separately which makes performance optimization of the integrated system a significant challenge. In this paper, we study the problem of using gradient-free optimization methods to jointly optimize the multiple domains of an autonomous system to find the set of optimal architectures for both hardware and software. We specifically perform multi-domain, multi-parameter optimization on an autonomous vehicle to find the best decision-making process, motion planning and control algorithms, and the physical parameters for autonomous racing. We detail the multi-domain optimization scheme, benchmark with different core components, and provide insights for generalization to new autonomous systems. In addition, this paper provides a benchmark of the performances of six different gradient-free optimizers in three different operating environments. Our approach is validated with a case study where we describe the autonomous vehicle system architecture, optimization methods, and finally, provide an argument on gradient-free optimization being a powerful choice to improve the performance of autonomous systems in an integrated manner.

The rising popularity of self-driving cars has led to the emergence of a new research field in the recent years: Autonomous racing. Researchers are developing software and hardware for high performance race vehicles which aim to operate autonomously on the edge of the vehicles limits: High speeds, high accelerations, low reaction times, highly uncertain, dynamic and adversarial environments. This paper represents the first holistic survey that covers the research in the field of autonomous racing. We focus on the field of autonomous racecars only and display the algorithms, methods and approaches that are used in the fields of perception, planning and control as well as end-to-end learning. Further, with an increasing number of autonomous racing competitions, researchers now have access to a range of high performance platforms to test and evaluate their autonomy algorithms. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the current autonomous racing platforms emphasizing both the software-hardware co-evolution to the current stage. Finally, based on additional discussion with leading researchers in the field we conclude with a summary of open research challenges that will guide future researchers in this field., Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables, 242 references

Motorsport has always been an enabler for technological advancement, and the same applies to the autonomous driving industry. The team TUM Auton-omous Motorsports will participate in the Indy Autonomous Challenge in Octo-ber 2021 to benchmark its self-driving software-stack by racing one out of ten autonomous Dallara AV-21 racecars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The first part of this paper explains the reasons for entering an autonomous vehicle race from an academic perspective: It allows focusing on several edge cases en-countered by autonomous vehicles, such as challenging evasion maneuvers and unstructured scenarios. At the same time, it is inherently safe due to the motor-sport related track safety precautions. It is therefore an ideal testing ground for the development of autonomous driving algorithms capable of mastering the most challenging and rare situations. In addition, we provide insight into our soft-ware development workflow and present our Hardware-in-the-Loop simulation setup. It is capable of running simulations of up to eight autonomous vehicles in real time. The second part of the paper gives a high-level overview of the soft-ware architecture and covers our development priorities in building a high-per-formance autonomous racing software: maximum sensor detection range, relia-ble handling of multi-vehicle situations, as well as reliable motion control under uncertainty.

In literature, scientists describe human mobility in a range of granularities by several different models. Using frameworks like MATSIM, VehiLux, or Sumo, they often derive individual human movement indicators in their most detail. However, such agent-based models tend to be difficult and require much information and computational power to correctly predict the commutation behavior of large mobility systems. Mobility information can be costly and researchers often cannot acquire it dynamically over large areas, which leads to a lack of adequate calibration parameters, rendering the easy and spontaneous prediction of mobility in additional areas impossible. This paper targets this problem and represents a concept that combines multiple substantial mobility theorems formulated in recent years to reduce the amount of required information compared to existing simulations. Our concept also targets computational expenses and aims to reduce them to enable a global prediction of mobility. Inspired by methods from other domains, the core idea of the conceptional innovation can be compared to weather models, which predict weather on a large scale, on an adequate level of regional information (airspeed, air pressure, etc.), but without the detailed movement information of each air atom and its particular simulation., Comment: Published paper in the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference - ITSC 2021

High-performance autonomy often must operate at the boundaries of safety. When external agents are present in a system, the process of ensuring safety without sacrificing performance becomes extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an approach to stress test such systems based on the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm. We propose to find faults in such systems through adversarial agent perturbations, where the behaviors of other agents in an otherwise fixed scenario are modified. This creates a large search space of possibilities, which we explore both randomly and with a focused strategy that runs RRT in a bounded projection of the observable states that we call the objective space. The approach is applied to generate tests for evaluating overtaking logic and path planning algorithms in autonomous racing, where the vehicles are driving at high speed in an adversarial environment. We evaluate several autonomous racing path planners, finding numerous collisions during overtake maneuvers in all planners. The focused RRT search finds several times more crashes than the random strategy, and, for certain planners, tens to hundreds of times more crashes in the second half of the track.

The rising popularity of driver-less cars has led to the research and development in the field of autonomous racing, and overtaking in autonomous racing is a challenging task. Vehicles have to detect and operate at the limits of dynamic handling and decisions in the car have to be made at high speeds and high acceleration. One of the most crucial parts in autonomous racing is path planning and decision making for an overtaking maneuver with a dynamic opponent vehicle. In this paper we present the evaluation of a track based offline policy learning approach for autonomous racing. We define specific track portions and conduct offline experiments to evaluate the probability of an overtaking maneuver based on speed and position of the ego vehicle. Based on these experiments we can define overtaking probability distributions for each of the track portions. Further, we propose a switching MPCC controller setup for incorporating the learnt policies to achieve a higher rate of overtaking maneuvers. By exhaustive simulations, we show that our proposed algorithm is able to increase the number of overtakes at different track portions., Comment: Presented at the 1st Workshop "Opportunitites and Challenges for Autonomous Racing" at the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021)

Automotive traffic scenes are complex due to the variety of possible scenarios, objects, and weather conditions that need to be handled. In contrast to more constrained environments, such as automated underground trains, automotive perception systems cannot be tailored to a narrow field of specific tasks but must handle an ever-changing environment with unforeseen events. As currently no single sensor is able to reliably perceive all relevant activity in the surroundings, sensor data fusion is applied to perceive as much information as possible. Data fusion of different sensors and sensor modalities on a low abstraction level enables the compensation of sensor weaknesses and misdetections among the sensors before the information-rich sensor data are compressed and thereby information is lost after a sensor-individual object detection. This paper develops a low-level sensor fusion network for 3D object detection, which fuses lidar, camera, and radar data. The fusion network is trained and evaluated on the nuScenes data set. On the test set, fusion of radar data increases the resulting AP (Average Precision) detection score by about 5.1% in comparison to the baseline lidar network. The radar sensor fusion proves especially beneficial in inclement conditions such as rain and night scenes. Fusing additional camera data contributes positively only in conjunction with the radar fusion, which shows that interdependencies of the sensors are important for the detection result. Additionally, the paper proposes a novel loss to handle the discontinuity of a simple yaw representation for object detection. Our updated loss increases the detection and orientation estimation performance for all sensor input configurations. The code for this research has been made available on GitHub.

With the evolution of self-driving cars, autonomous racing series like Roborace and the Indy Autonomous Challenge are rapidly attracting growing attention. Researchers participating in these competitions hope to subsequently transfer their developed functionality to passenger vehicles, in order to improve self-driving technology for reasons of safety, and due to environmental and social benefits. The race track has the advantage of being a safe environment where challenging situations for the algorithms are permanently created. To achieve minimum lap times on the race track, it is important to gather and process information about external influences including, e.g., the position of other cars and the friction potential between the road and the tires. Furthermore, the predicted behavior of the ego-car's propulsion system is crucial for leveraging the available energy as efficiently as possible. In this paper, we therefore present an optimization-based velocity planner, mathematically formulated as a multi-parametric Sequential Quadratic Problem (mpSQP). This planner can handle a spatially and temporally varying friction coefficient, and transfer a race Energy Strategy (ES) to the road. It further handles the velocity-profile-generation task for performance and emergency trajectories in real time on the vehicle's Electronic Control Unit (ECU).

The development of software components for autonomous driving functions should always include an extensive and rigorous evaluation. Since real-world testing is expensive and safety-critical -- especially when facing dynamic racing scenarios at the limit of handling -- a favored approach is simulation-based testing. In this work, we propose an open-source graphical user interface, which allows the generation of a multi-vehicle scenario in a regular or even a race environment. The underlying method and implementation is elaborated in detail. Furthermore, we showcase the potential use-cases for the scenario-based validation of a safety assessment module, integrated into an autonomous driving software stack. Within this scope, we introduce three illustrative scenarios, each focusing on a different safety-critical aspect., Comment: Accepted at 2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER)

The way to full autonomy of public road vehicles requires the step-by-step replacement of the human driver, with the ultimate goal of replacing the driver completely. Eventually, the driving software has to be able to handle all situations that occur on its own, even emergency situations. These particular situations require extreme combined braking and steering actions at the limits of handling to avoid an accident or to diminish its consequences. An average human driver is not trained to handle such extreme and rarely occurring situations and therefore often fails to do so. However, professional race drivers are trained to drive a vehicle utilizing the maximum amount of possible tire forces. These abilities are of high interest for the development of autonomous driving software. Here, we compare a professional race driver and our software stack developed for autonomous racing with data analysis techniques established in motorsports. The goal of this research is to derive indications for further improvement of the performance of our software and to identify areas where it still fails to meet the performance level of the human race driver. Our results are used to extend our software's capabilities and also to incorporate our findings into the research and development of public road autonomous vehicles., Comment: Accepted at 2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER)

Trajectory planning at high velocities and at the handling limits is a challenging task. In order to cope with the requirements of a race scenario, we propose a far-sighted two step, multi-layered graph-based trajectory planner, capable to run with speeds up to 212~km/h. The planner is designed to generate an action set of multiple drivable trajectories, allowing an adjacent behavior planner to pick the most appropriate action for the global state in the scene. This method serves objectives such as race line tracking, following, stopping, overtaking and a velocity profile which enables a handling of the vehicle at the limit of friction. Thereby, it provides a high update rate, a far planning horizon and solutions to non-convex scenarios. The capabilities of the proposed method are demonstrated in simulation and on a real race vehicle., Comment: Accepted at The 22nd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, October 27 - 30, 2019

Regulatory approval and safety guarantees for autonomous vehicles facing frequent functional updates and complex software stacks, including artificial intelligence, are a challenging topic. This paper proposes a concept and guideline for the development of an online verification module -- the Supervisor -- capable of handling the aforementioned challenges. The concept presented for the establishment of a Supervisor is designed in a way to identify and monitor an extensive list of features contributing to safe operation. As a result, a safe overall (sub)system is attained. Safeguarding a motion planner of an autonomous race vehicle is used to illustrate the procedure and practicability of the framework at hand. The capabilities of the proposed method are evaluated in a scenario-based test environment and on full-scale vehicle data., Comment: Accepted at The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, September 20 - 23, 2020

The automation of passenger vehicles is becoming more and more widespread, leading to full autonomy of cars within the next years. Furthermore, sustainable electric mobility is gaining in importance. As racecars have been a development platform for technology that has later also been transferred to passenger vehicles, a race format for autonomous electric racecars called Roborace has been created. As electric racecars only store a limited amount of energy, an Energy Management Strategy (EMS) is needed to work out the time as well as the minimum energy trajectories for the track. At the same time, the technical limitations and component behavior in the electric powertrain must be taken into account when calculating the race trajectories. In this paper, we present a concept for a special type of EMS. This is based on the Optimal Control Problem (OCP) of generating a time-minimal global trajectory which is solved by the transcription via direct orthogonal collocation to a Nonlinear Programming Problem (NLPP). We extend this minimum lap time problem by adding our ideas for a holistic EMS. This approach proves the fundamental feasibility of the stated ideas, e.g. varying racepaths and velocities due to energy limitations, covered by the EMS. Also, the presented concept forms the basis for future work on meta-models of the powertrain's components that can be fed into the OCP to increase the validity of the control output of the EMS., Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference - ITSC 2019, Auckland, New Zealand 27 - 30 October

Object detection in camera images, using deep learning has been proven successfully in recent years. Rising detection rates and computationally efficient network structures are pushing this technique towards application in production vehicles. Nevertheless, the sensor quality of the camera is limited in severe weather conditions and through increased sensor noise in sparsely lit areas and at night. Our approach enhances current 2D object detection networks by fusing camera data and projected sparse radar data in the network layers. The proposed CameraRadarFusionNet (CRF-Net) automatically learns at which level the fusion of the sensor data is most beneficial for the detection result. Additionally, we introduce BlackIn, a training strategy inspired by Dropout, which focuses the learning on a specific sensor type. We show that the fusion network is able to outperform a state-of-the-art image-only network for two different datasets. The code for this research will be made available to the public at: https://github.com/TUMFTM/CameraRadarFusionNet., Comment: Accepted at 2019 Sensor Data Fusion: Trends, Solutions, Applications (SDF)

Electric vhicles and autonomous driving dominate current research efforts in the automotive sector. The two topics go hand in hand in terms of enabling safer and more environmentally friendly driving. One fundamental building block of an autonomous vehicle is the ability to build a map of the environment and localize itself on such a map. In this paper, we make use of a stereo camera sensor in order to perceive the environment and create the map. With live Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), there is a risk of mislocalization, since no ground truth map is used as a reference and errors accumulate over time. Therefore, we first build up and save a map of visual features of the environment at low driving speeds with our extension to the ORB-SLAM\,2 package. In a second run, we reload the map and then localize on the previously built-up map. Loading and localizing on a previously built map can improve the continuous localization accuracy for autonomous vehicles in comparison to a full SLAM. This map saving feature is missing in the original ORB-SLAM\,2 implementation. We evaluate the localization accuracy for scenes of the KITTI dataset against the built up SLAM map. Furthermore, we test the localization on data recorded with our own small scale electric model car. We show that the relative translation error of the localization stays under 1\% for a vehicle travelling at an average longitudinal speed of 36 m/s in a feature-rich environment. The localization mode contributes to a better localization accuracy and lower computational load compared to a full SLAM. The source code of our contribution to the ORB-SLAM2 will be made public at: https://github.com/TUMFTM/orbslam-map-saving-extension., Comment: Accepted at 2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER)

3D object detection based on monocular camera data is a key enabler for autonomous driving. The task however, is ill-posed due to lack of depth information in 2D images. Recent deep learning methods show promising results to recover depth information from single images by learning priors about the environment. Several competing strategies tackle this problem. In addition to the network design, the major difference of these competing approaches lies in using a supervised or self-supervised optimization loss function, which require different data and ground truth information. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a 3D object detection pipeline which is parameterizable with different depth estimation configurations. We implement a simple distance calculation approach based on camera intrinsics and 2D bounding box size, a self-supervised, and a supervised learning approach for depth estimation. Ground truth depth information cannot be recorded reliable in real world scenarios. This shifts our training focus to simulation data. In simulation, labeling and ground truth generation can be automatized. We evaluate the detection pipeline on simulator data and a real world sequence from an autonomous vehicle on a race track. The benefit of simulation training to real world application is investigated. Advantages and drawbacks of the different depth estimation strategies are discussed., Comment: Accepted at The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, September 20 - 23, 2020

Increasing attention to autonomous passenger vehicles has also attracted interest in an autonomous racing series. Because of this, platforms such as Roborace and the Indy Autonomous Challenge are currently evolving. Electric racecars face the challenge of a limited amount of stored energy within their batteries. Furthermore, the thermodynamical influence of an all-electric powertrain on the race performance is crucial. Severe damage can occur to the powertrain components when thermally overstressed. In this work we present a race-time minimal control strategy deduced from an Optimal Control Problem (OCP) that is transcribed into a Nonlinear Problem (NLP). Its optimization variables stem from the driving dynamics as well as from a thermodynamical description of the electric powertrain. We deduce the necessary first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE)s and form simplified loss models for the implementation within the numerical optimization. The significant influence of the powertrain behavior on the race strategy is shown., Comment: Accepted at The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, September 20 - 23, 2020