In plain words: A car learns to steer from LiDAR point clouds, using sparse processing to stay fast and a single pass to judge confidence before combining steering guesses. On a real vehicle it kept its lane and needed far fewer human takeovers during sensor failures.
Abstract · Efficient and Robust LiDAR-Based End-to-End Navigation
Deep learning has been used to demonstrate end-to-end neural network learning for autonomous vehicle control from raw sensory input. While LiDAR sensors provide reliably accurate information, existing end-to-end driving solutions are mainly based on cameras since processing 3D data requires a large memory footprint and computation cost. On the other hand, increasing the robustness of these systems is also critical; however, even estimating the model's uncertainty is very challenging due to the cost of sampling-based methods. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust LiDAR-based end-to-end navigation framework. We first introduce Fast-LiDARNet that is based on sparse convolution kernel optimization and hardware-aware model design. We then propose Hybrid Evidential Fusion that directly estimates the uncertainty of the prediction from only a single forward pass and then fuses the control predictions intelligently. We evaluate our system on a full-scale vehicle and demonstrate lane-stable as well as navigation capabilities. In the presence of out-of-distribution events (e.g., sensor failures), our system significantly improves robustness and reduces the number of takeovers in the real world.
Zhijian Liu, Alexander Amini, Sibo Zhu, Sertac Karaman, Song Han, Daniela Rus
arXiv:2105.09932 · cs.RO, cs.CV · submitted May 20, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · ICRA 2021. The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: https://le2ed.mit.edu/