Self-driving scale car trained by Deep reinforcement learning

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning approach using virtual simulation for training a scale car to achieve autonomous driving, improving generalization and safety through sim2real transfer.

Contribution

It introduces a virtual simulation environment for training self-driving cars with deep reinforcement learning and demonstrates effective sim2real transfer to real-world scale cars.

Findings

The trained model enables a scale car to drive autonomously in real-world scenarios.

Simulation-based training improves safety and generalization in autonomous driving.

The approach effectively transfers learned behaviors from virtual to real environments.

Abstract

The self-driving based on deep reinforcement learning, as the most important application of artificial intelligence, has become a popular topic. Most of the current self-driving methods focus on how to directly learn end-to-end self-driving control strategy from the raw sensory data. Essentially, this control strategy can be considered as a mapping between images and driving behavior, which usually faces a problem of low generalization ability. To improve the generalization ability for the driving behavior, the reinforcement learning method requires extrinsic reward from the real environment, which may damage the car. In order to obtain a good generalization ability in safety, a virtual simulation environment that can be constructed different driving scene is designed by Unity. A theoretical model is established and analyzed in the virtual simulation environment, and it is trained by double Deep Q-network. Then, the trained model is migrated to a scale car in real world. This process is also called a sim2real method. The sim2real training method efficiently handle the these two problems. The simulations and experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Finally, it is demonstrated that the scale car in real world obtain the capability for autonomous driving.