Related papers: Learn-to-Race: A Multimodal Control Environment fo…

Autonomous vehicles have shown promising potential to be a groundbreaking technology for improving the safety of road users. For these vehicles, as well as many other safety-critical robotic technologies, to be deployed in real-world…

Autonomous race driving poses a complex control challenge as vehicles must be operated at the edge of their handling limits to reduce lap times while respecting physical and safety constraints. This paper presents a novel reinforcement…

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) techniques have recently yielded promising results for real-world autonomous racing using high-dimensional observations. MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, solve long-horizon tasks by building a world…

The classical method of autonomous racing uses real-time localisation to follow a precalculated optimal trajectory. In contrast, end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL) can train agents to race using only raw LiDAR scans. While…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown remarkable success in solving complex tasks across various research fields. However, transferring DRL agents to the real world is still challenging due to the significant discrepancies between…

Safe and efficient autonomous driving maneuvers in an interactive and complex environment can be considerably challenging due to the unpredictable actions of other surrounding agents that may be cooperative or adversarial in their…

Safety is a long-standing and the final pursuit in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a significant portion of safety challenge arising from perception. How to effectively evaluate the safety as well as the reliability of…

The goal of this thesis is to design a learning model predictive controller (LMPC) that allows multiple agents to race competitively on a predefined race track in real-time. This thesis addresses two major shortcomings in the already…

This work presents a novel Learning Model Predictive Control (LMPC) strategy for autonomous racing at the handling limit that can iteratively explore and learn unknown dynamics in high-speed operational domains. We start from existing LMPC…

Fully autonomous vehicles promise enhanced safety and efficiency. However, ensuring reliable operation in challenging corner cases requires control algorithms capable of performing at the vehicle limits. We address this requirement by…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising solution for autonomous vehicles to deal with complex and uncertain traffic environments. The RL training process is however expensive, unsafe, and time consuming. Algorithms are often developed…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved outstanding success in complex robot control tasks, such as drone racing, where the RL agents have outperformed human champions in a known racing track. However, these agents fail in unseen track…

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) is a promising approach to reduce the high sample complexity of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) by eliminating the need for continuous environmental interactions. ORL exploits a dataset of…

The socially-aware navigation system has evolved to adeptly avoid various obstacles while performing multiple tasks, such as point-to-point navigation, human-following, and -guiding. However, a prominent gap persists: in Human-Robot…

The way to full autonomy of public road vehicles requires the step-by-step replacement of the human driver, with the ultimate goal of replacing the driver completely. Eventually, the driving software has to be able to handle all situations…

We present Sym2Real, a fully data-driven framework that provides a principled way to train low-level adaptive controllers in a highly data-efficient manner. Using only about 10 trajectories, we achieve robust control of both a quadrotor and…

Autonomous racing with scaled race cars has gained increasing attention as an effective approach for developing perception, planning and control algorithms for safe autonomous driving at the limits of the vehicle's handling. To train agile…

To safely navigate intricate real-world scenarios, autonomous vehicles must be able to adapt to diverse road conditions and anticipate future events. World model (WM) based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach by…

Autonomous racing has rapidly gained research attention. Traditionally, racing cars rely on 2D LiDAR as their primary visual system. In this work, we explore the integration of an event camera with the existing system to provide enhanced…

Autonomous driving is complex, requiring sophisticated 3D scene understanding, localization, mapping, and control. Rather than explicitly modelling and fusing each of these components, we instead consider an end-to-end approach via…