No abstract

In this work, we study vision-based end-to-end reinforcement learning on vehicle control problems, such as lane following and collision avoidance. Our controller policy is able to control a small-scale robot to follow the right-hand lane of a real two-lane road, while its training was solely carried out in a simulation. Our model, realized by a simple, convolutional network, only relies on images of a forward-facing monocular camera and generates continuous actions that directly control the vehicle. To train this policy we used Proximal Policy Optimization, and to achieve the generalization capability required for real performance we used domain randomization. We carried out thorough analysis of the trained policy, by measuring multiple performance metrics and comparing these to baselines that rely on other methods. To assess the quality of the simulation-toreality transfer learning process and the performance of the controller in the real world, we measured simple metrics on a real track and compared these with results from a matching simulation. Further analysis was carried out by visualizing salient object maps.

<p class="Abstract">The present study focused on vision-based end-to-end reinforcement learning in relation to<strong> </strong>vehicle control problems such as lane following and collision avoidance. The controller policy presented in this paper is able to control a small-scale robot to follow the right-hand lane of a real two-lane road, although its training has only been carried out in a simulation. This model, realised by a simple, convolutional network, relies on images of a forward-facing monocular camera and generates continuous actions that directly control the vehicle. To train this policy, proximal policy optimization was used, and to achieve the generalisation capability required for real performance, domain randomisation was used. A thorough analysis of the trained policy was conducted by measuring multiple performance metrics and comparing these to baselines that rely on other methods. To assess the quality of the simulation-to-reality transfer learning process and the performance of the controller in the real world, simple metrics were measured on a real track and compared with results from a matching simulation. Further analysis was carried out by visualising salient object maps.</p>

No abstract