Reinforcement Learning Strategy for Automatic Control of Real-time Obstacle Avoidance based on Vehicle Dynamics

As the development of autonomous vehicles becomes realistic, many automobile manufacturers and components producers aim to develop 'completely autonomous driving'. ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) which has been applied in automobile recently, supports the driver in controlling lane maintenance, speed and direction in a single lane based on limited road environment. Although technologies of obstacles avoidance on the obstacle environment have been developed, they concentrates on simple obstacle avoidances, not considering the control of the actual vehicle in the real situation which makes drivers feel unsafe from the sudden change of the wheel and the speed of the vehicle. In order to develop the 'completely autonomous driving' automobile which perceives the surrounding environment by itself and operates, ability of the vehicle should be enhanced in a way human driver does. In this sense, this paper intends to establish a strategy with which autonomous vehicles behave human-friendly based on vehicle dynamics through the reinforcement learning that is based on Q-learning, a type of machine learning. The obstacle avoidance reinforcement learning proceeded in 5 simulations. The reward rule has been set in the experiment so that the car can learn by itself with recurring events, allowing the experiment to have the similar environment to the one when humans drive. Driving Simulator has been used to verify results of the reinforcement learning. The ultimate goal of this study is to enable autonomous vehicles avoid obstacles in a human-friendly way when obstacles appear in their sight, using controlling methods that have previously been learned in various conditions through the reinforcement learning.

실시간 장애물 회피 자동 조작을 위한 차량 동역학 기반의 강화학습 전략