DriveEnv-NeRF: Exploration of A NeRF-Based Autonomous Driving Environment for Real-World Performance Validation

TL;DR

DriveEnv-NeRF uses Neural Radiance Fields to create high-fidelity, realistic simulation environments for autonomous driving, improving validation accuracy and robustness of driving agents in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

This paper introduces DriveEnv-NeRF, a novel NeRF-based framework that bridges the sim-to-real gap for autonomous driving validation and training.

Findings

DriveEnv-NeRF accurately predicts real-world success rates.

It enhances autonomous agents' robustness under various lighting conditions.

The framework reduces performance gap between simulation and real deployment.

Abstract

In this study, we introduce the DriveEnv-NeRF framework, which leverages Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to enable the validation and faithful forecasting of the efficacy of autonomous driving agents in a targeted real-world scene. Standard simulator-based rendering often fails to accurately reflect real-world performance due to the sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between virtual simulations and real-world conditions. To mitigate this gap, we propose a workflow for building a high-fidelity simulation environment of the targeted real-world scene using NeRF. This approach is capable of rendering realistic images from novel viewpoints and constructing 3D meshes for emulating collisions. The validation of these capabilities through the comparison of success rates in both simulated and real environments demonstrates the benefits of using DriveEnv-NeRF as a real-world performance indicator. Furthermore, the DriveEnv-NeRF framework can serve as a training environment for autonomous driving agents under various lighting conditions. This approach enhances the robustness of the agents and reduces performance degradation when deployed to the target real scene, compared to agents fully trained using the standard simulator rendering pipeline.