This paper presents an adaptive lookahead pure-pursuit lateral controller for optimizing racing metrics such as lap time, average lap speed, and deviation from a reference trajectory in an autonomous racing scenario. We propose a greedy algorithm to compute and assign optimal lookahead distances for the pure-pursuit controller for each waypoint on a reference trajectory for improving the race metrics. We use a ROS based autonomous racing simulator to evaluate the adaptive pure-pursuit algorithm and compare our method with several other pure-pursuit based lateral controllers. We also demonstrate our approach on a scaled real testbed using a F1/10 autonomous racecar. Our method results in a significant improvement (20%) in the racing metrics for an autonomous racecar.
more »
« less
TUNERCAR: A Superoptimization Toolchain for Autonomous Racing
TUNERCAR is a toolchain that jointly optimizes racing strategy, planning methods, control algorithms, and vehicle parameters for an autonomous racecar. In this paper, we detail the target hardware, software, simulators, and systems infrastructure for this toolchain. Our methodology employs a parallel implementation of CMA-ES which enables simulations to proceed 6 times faster than real-world rollouts. We show our approach can reduce the lap times in autonomous racing, given a fixed computational budget. For all tested tracks, our method provides the lowest lap time, and relative improvements in lap time between 7-21%. We demonstrate improvements over a naive random search method with equivalent computational budget of over 15 seconds/lap, and improvements over expert solutions of over 2 seconds/lap. We further compare the performance of our method against hand-tuned solutions submitted by over 30 international teams, comprised of graduate students working in the field of autonomous vehicles. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of utilizing an online planning mechanism to reduce the reality gap between our simulation and actual tests.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1925587
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10221876
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5356 to 5362
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This paper presents a hybrid online Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) planning system that addresses the problem of autonomous navigation in the presence of multi-modal uncertainty introduced by other agents in the environment. As a particular example, we consider the problem of autonomous navigation in dense crowds of pedestrians and among obstacles. Popular approaches to this problem first generate a path using a complete planner (e.g., Hybrid A*) with ad-hoc assumptions about uncertainty, then use online tree-based POMDP solvers to reason about uncertainty with control over a limited aspect of the problem (i.e. speed along the path). We present a more capable and responsive real-time approach enabling the POMDP planner to control more degrees of freedom (e.g., both speed AND heading) to achieve more flexible and efficient solutions. This modification greatly extends the region of the state space that the POMDP planner must reason over, significantly increasing the importance of finding effective roll-out policies within the limited computational budget that real time control affords. Our key insight is to use multi-query motion planning techniques (e.g., Probabilistic Roadmaps or Fast Marching Method) as priors for rapidly generating efficient roll-out policies for every state that the POMDP planning tree might reach during its limited horizon search. Our proposed approach generates trajectories that are safe and significantly more efficient than the previous approach, even in densely crowded dynamic environments with long planning horizons.more » « less
-
risk-aware planning ; Conditional Value-at-Risk ; Model Predictive Control ; Model Predictive Path Integral (Ed.)In this paper, we present a novel Model Predictive Control method for autonomous robot planning and control subject to arbitrary forms of uncertainty. The proposed Risk- Aware Model Predictive Path Integral (RA-MPPI) control utilizes the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) measure to generate optimal control actions for safety-critical robotic applications. Different from most existing Stochastic MPCs and CVaR optimization methods that linearize the original dynamics and formulate control tasks as convex programs, the proposed method directly uses the original dynamics without restricting the form of the cost functions or the noise. We apply the novel RA-MPPI controller to an autonomous vehicle to perform aggressive driving maneuvers in cluttered environments. Our simulations and experiments show that the proposed RA-MPPI controller can achieve similar lap times with the baseline MPPI controller while encountering significantly fewer collisions. The proposed controller performs online computation at an update frequency of up to 80 Hz, utilizing modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to multi-thread the generation of trajectories as well as the CVaR values.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)This paper revisits the k-mismatch shortest unique substring finding problem and demonstrates that a technique recently presented in the context of solving the k-mismatch average common substring problem can be adapted and combined with parts of the existing solution, resulting in a new algorithm which has expected time complexity of O(n log^k n), while maintaining a practical space complexity at O(kn), where n is the string length. When , which is the hard case, our new proposal significantly improves the any-case O(n^2) time complexity of the prior best method for k-mismatch shortest unique substring finding. Experimental study shows that our new algorithm is practical to implement and demonstrates significant improvements in processing time compared to the prior best solution's implementation when k is small relative to n. For example, our method processes a 200 KB sample DNA sequence with k=1 in just 0.18 seconds compared to 174.37 seconds with the prior best solution. Further, it is observed that significant portions of the adapted technique can be executed in parallel, using two different simple concurrency models, resulting in further significant practical performance improvement. As an example, when using 8 cores, the parallel implementations both achieved processing times that are less than 1/4 of the serial implementation's time cost, when processing a 10 MB sample DNA sequence with k=2. In an age where instances with thousands of gigabytes of RAM are readily available for use through Cloud infrastructure providers, it is likely that the trade-off of additional memory usage for significantly improved processing times will be desirable and needed by many users. For example, the best prior solution may spend years to finish a DNA sample of 200MB for any , while this new proposal, using 24 cores, can finish processing a sample of this size with k=1 in 206.376 seconds with a peak memory usage of 46 GB, which is both easily available and affordable on Cloud. It is expected that this new efficient and practical algorithm for k-mismatch shortest unique substring finding will prove useful to those using the measure on long sequences in fields such as computational biology. We also give a theoretical bound that the k-mismatch shortest unique substring finding problem can be solved using O(n log^k n) time and O(n) space, asymptotically much better than the one we implemented, serving as a new discovery of interest.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Balancing performance and safety is crucial to deploying autonomous vehicles in multi-agent environments. In particular, autonomous racing is a domain that penalizes safe but conservative policies, highlighting the need for robust, adaptive strategies. Current approaches either make simplifying assumptions about other agents or lack robust mechanisms for online adaptation. This work makes algorithmic contributions to both challenges. First, to generate a realistic, diverse set of opponents, we develop a novel method for self-play based on replica-exchange Markov chain Monte Carlo. Second, we propose a distributionally robust bandit optimization procedure that adaptively adjusts risk aversion relative to uncertainty in beliefs about opponents’ behaviors. We rigorously quantify the tradeoffs in performance and robustness when approximating these computations in real-time motion-planning, and we demonstrate our methods experimentally on autonomous vehicles that achieve scaled speeds comparable to Formula One racecars.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197080
