Title
Pre-Training With Asynchronous Supervised Learning For Reinforcement Learning Based Autonomous Driving
Abstract
Rule-based autonomous driving systems may suffer from increased complexity with large-scale intercoupled rules, so many researchers are exploring learning-based approaches. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied in designing autonomous driving systems because of its outstanding performance on a wide variety of sequential control problems. However, poor initial performance is a major challenge to the practical implementation of an RL-based autonomous driving system. RL training requires extensive training data before the model achieves reasonable performance, making an RL-based model inapplicable in a real-world setting, particularly when data are expensive. We propose an asynchronous supervised learning (ASL) method for the RL-based end-to-end autonomous driving model to address the problem of poor initial performance before training this RL-based model in real-world settings. Specifically, prior knowledge is introduced in the ASL pre-training stage by asynchronously executing multiple supervised learning processes in parallel, on multiple driving demonstration data sets. After pre-training, the model is deployed on a real vehicle to be further trained by RL to adapt to the real environment and continuously break the performance limit. The presented pre-training method is evaluated on the race car simulator, TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator), to verify that it can be sufficiently reliable in improving the initial performance and convergence speed of an end-to-end autonomous driving model in the RL training stage. In addition, a real-vehicle verification system is built to verify the feasibility of the proposed pre-training method in a real-vehicle deployment. Simulations results show that using some demonstrations during a supervised pre-training stage allows significant improvements in initial performance and convergence speed in the RL training stage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1631/FITEE.1900637
FRONTIERS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Self-driving, Autonomous vehicles, Reinforcement learning, Supervised learning, TP181, U495
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
2095-9184
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunpeng Wang119425.34
Kunxian Zheng272.49
Daxin Tian320432.49
Xuting Duan4457.80
Jianshan Zhou512913.66