Segmented Encoding for Sim2Real of RL-based End-to-End Autonomous Driving | |
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Year | 2022 |
Month | |
Journal | 2022 / IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) |
Author | Seung-Hwan Chung, Seung-Hyun Kong, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Sanjae Cho |
Among the challenges in the recent research ofend-to-end (E2E) driving, interpretability and distribution shiftin the simulation-to-real (Sim2Real) have drawn considerableattention. Because of low interpretability, we cannot clearlyexplain the causal relationship between the input image andthe control actions by the network. Moreover, the distributionshift problem in Sim2Real degrades the driving performanceof the policy in the realworld deployment. In this paper, wepropose a segmentation-based classwise disentangled latentencoding algorithm to cope with the two challenges. In theproposed algorithm, multi-class segmentation transfers RGBimages in both simulation and real environments to the samedomain, while preserving the necessary information of objects ofprimary classes, such as pedestrian, road, and cars, for drivingdecisions. Besides, in the class-wise disentangled latent encoding,segmented images are encoded to a latent vector, which improvesthe interpretability significantly, since the state input has astructured format. The interpretability improvement is testifiedby the t-stochastic neighbor embedding, image reconstructionand the causal relationship between the real images and thecontrol actions. We deploy the driving policy trained in thesimulation directly to an autonomous vehicle platform and show,to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of theRL-based E2E autonomous in various real environments |