Learning-based Autonomous Oversteer Control and Collision Avoidance

TL;DR

This paper presents QC-SAC, a novel learning algorithm enabling autonomous vehicles to safely control oversteer and avoid collisions in challenging, real-world-like scenarios, surpassing existing methods.

Contribution

Introduction of QC-SAC, a hybrid learning algorithm that learns effectively from suboptimal demonstrations for autonomous oversteer control and collision avoidance.

Findings

QC-SAC achieves near-optimal driving policies.

Outperforms state-of-the-art IL, RL, and HL baselines.

First safe autonomous oversteer control with obstacle avoidance.

Abstract

Oversteer, wherein a vehicle's rear tires lose traction and induce unintentional excessive yaw, poses critical safety challenges. Failing to control oversteer often leads to severe traffic accidents. Although recent autonomous driving efforts have attempted to handle oversteer through stabilizing maneuvers, the majority rely on expert-defined trajectories or assume obstacle-free environments, limiting real-world applicability. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving approach that tackles oversteer control and collision avoidance simultaneously. Existing E2E techniques, including Imitation Learning (IL), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Hybrid Learning (HL), generally require near-optimal demonstrations or extensive experience. Yet even skilled human drivers struggle to provide perfect demonstrations under oversteer, and high transition variance hinders accumulating sufficient data. Hence, we present Q-Compared Soft Actor-Critic (QC-SAC), a new HL algorithm that effectively learns from suboptimal demonstration data and adapts rapidly to new conditions. To evaluate QC-SAC, we introduce a benchmark inspired by real-world driver training: a vehicle encounters sudden oversteer on a slippery surface and must avoid randomly placed obstacles ahead. Experimental results show QC-SAC attains near-optimal driving policies, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art IL, RL, and HL baselines. Our method demonstrates the world's first safe autonomous oversteer control with obstacle avoidance.