Filtering by
- All Subjects: robotics
- All Subjects: Vehicles, Remotely piloted--Design and construction.
- Creators: Ben Amor, Heni
- Status: Published
One of the expectations from fully-automated vehicles is never to cause an accident. However, an automated vehicle may not be able to avoid all collisions, e.g., the collisions caused by other road occupants. Hence, it is important for the system designers to understand the boundary case scenarios where an autonomous vehicle can no longer avoid a collision. Besides safety, there are other expectations from automated vehicles such as comfortable driving and minimal fuel consumption. All safety and functional expectations from an automated driving system should be captured with a set of system requirements. It is challenging to create requirements that are unambiguous and usable for the design, testing, and evaluation of automated driving systems. Another challenge is to define useful metrics for assessing the testing quality because in general, it is impossible to test every possible scenario.
The goal of this dissertation is to formalize the theory for testing automated vehicles. Various methods for automatic test generation for automated-driving systems in simulation environments are presented and compared. The contributions presented in this dissertation include (i) new metrics that can be used to discover the boundary cases between safe and unsafe driving conditions, (ii) a new approach that combines combinatorial testing and optimization-guided test generation methods, (iii) approaches that utilize global optimization methods and random exploration to generate critical vehicle and pedestrian trajectories for testing purposes, (iv) a publicly-available simulation-based automated vehicle testing framework that enables application of the existing testing approaches in the literature, including the new approaches presented in this dissertation.
Machines operating in an uncertain Environment (FAME), this thesis addresses several
critical modeling, design, control objectives for rear-wheel drive ground vehicles.
Toward this ambitious goal, several critical objectives are addressed. One central objective of the thesis was to show how to build low-cost multi-capability robot platform
that can be used for conducting FAME research.
A TFC-KIT car chassis was augmented to provide a suite of substantive capabilities.
The augmented vehicle (FreeSLAM Robot) costs less than $500 but offers the capability
of commercially available vehicles costing over $2000.
All demonstrations presented involve rear-wheel drive FreeSLAM robot. The following
summarizes the key hardware demonstrations presented and analyzed:
(1)Cruise (v, ) control along a line,
(2) Cruise (v, ) control along a curve,
(3) Planar (x, y) Cartesian Stabilization for rear wheel drive vehicle,
(4) Finish the track with camera pan tilt structure in minimum time,
(5) Finish the track without camera pan tilt structure in minimum time,
(6) Vision based tracking performance with different cruise speed vx,
(7) Vision based tracking performance with different camera fixed look-ahead distance L,
(8) Vision based tracking performance with different delay Td from vision subsystem,
(9) Manually remote controlled robot to perform indoor SLAM,
(10) Autonomously line guided robot to perform indoor SLAM.
For most cases, hardware data is compared with, and corroborated by, model based
simulation data. In short, the thesis uses low-cost self-designed rear-wheel
drive robot to demonstrate many capabilities that are critical in order to reach the
longer-term FAME goal.
Robots are often used in long-duration scenarios, such as on the surface of Mars,where they may need to adapt to environmental changes. Typically, robots have been built specifically for single tasks, such as moving boxes in a warehouse or surveying construction sites. However, there is a modern trend away from human hand-engineering and toward robot learning. To this end, the ideal robot is not engineered,but automatically designed for a specific task. This thesis focuses on robots which learn path-planning algorithms for specific environments. Learning is accomplished via genetic programming. Path-planners are represented as Python code, which is optimized via Pareto evolution. These planners are encouraged to explore curiously and efficiently. This research asks the questions: “How can robots exhibit life-long learning where they adapt to changing environments in a robust way?”, and “How can robots learn to be curious?”.
This thesis proposes a graph based neural network architecture, SwarmNet, for learning the swarming behaviors of multi-agent systems. Given observation of only the trajectories of an expert multi-agent system, the SwarmNet is able to learn sensible representations of the internal low-level interactions on top of being able to approximate the high-level behaviors and make long-term prediction of the motion of the system. Challenges in scaling the SwarmNet and graph neural networks in general are discussed in detail, along with measures to alleviate the scaling issue in generalization is proposed. Using the trained network as a control policy, it is shown that the combination of imitation learning and reinforcement learning improves the policy more efficiently. To some extent, it is shown that the low-level interactions are successfully identified and separated and that the separated functionality enables fine controlled custom training.