Intelligent Transportation Systems

Decentralized Vehicle Coordination: The Berkeley DeepDrive Drone Dataset

Wu, Fangyu
Wang, Dequan
Hwang, Minjune
Hao, Chenhui
Lu, Jiawei
Bayen, Alexandre
2022

Decentralized multiagent planning has been an important field of research in robotics. An interesting and impactful application in the field is decentralized vehicle coordination in understructured road environments. For example, in an intersection, it is useful yet difficult to deconflict multiple vehicles of intersecting paths in absence of a central coordinator. We learn from common sense that, for a vehicle to navigate through such understructured environments, the driver must understand and conform to the implicit "social etiquette" observed by nearby drivers. To study this implicit...

Limitations and Improvements of the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM)

Albeaik, Saleh
Bayen, Alexandre
Chiri, Maria Teresa
Hayat, Amaury
Kardous, Nicolas
2022

Starting from interaction rules based on two levels of stochasticity we study the influence of the microscopic dynamics on the macroscopic properties of vehicular flow. In particular, we study the qualitative structure of the resulting flux-density and speed-density diagrams for different choices of the desired speeds. We are able to recover multivalued diagrams as a result of the existence of a one-parameter family of stationary distributions, whose expression is analytically found by means of a Fokker--Planck approximation of the initial Boltzmann-type model.

The Surprising Effectiveness of PPO in Cooperative Multi-Agent Games

Yu, Chao
Velu, Akash
Vinitsky, Eugene
Gao, Jiaxuan
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2022

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a ubiquitous on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm but is significantly less utilized than off-policy learning algorithms in multi-agent settings. This is often due to the belief that PPO is significantly less sample efficient than off-policy methods in multi-agent systems. In this work, we carefully study the performance of PPO in cooperative multi-agent settings. We show that PPO-based multi-agent algorithms achieve surprisingly strong performance in four popular multi-agent testbeds: the particle-world environments, the StarCraft multi-...

Longitudinal Deep Truck: Deep Longitudinal Model with Application to sim2real Deep Reinforcement Learning for Heavy-duty Truck Control in the Field

Albeaik, Saleh
Wu, Trevor
Vurimi, Ganeshnikhil
Chou, Fang-Chieh
Lu, Xiao-Yun
2023

To develop cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), the choice of control approach often influences and can limit the choice of model structure, and vice versa. For heavy-duty trucks, practical application of CACC in the field is heavily influenced by the accuracy of the used model. Deep learning and deep reinforcement learning (deep-RL) have recently been used to demonstrate improved modeling and control performance for vehicles such as cars and quadrotors compared to state-of-the-art. The literature on the application of deep learning and deep-RL for heavy-duty trucks in the field,...

Unified Automatic Control of Vehicular Systems With Reinforcement Learning

Yan, Zhongxia
Kreidieh, Abdul Rahman
Vinitsky, Eugene
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2023

Emerging vehicular systems with increasing proportions of automated components present opportunities for optimal control to mitigate congestion and increase efficiency. There has been a recent interest in applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to these nonlinear dynamical systems for the automatic design of effective control strategies. Despite conceptual advantages of DRL being model-free, studies typically nonetheless rely on training setups that are painstakingly specialized to specific vehicular systems. This is a key challenge to efficient analysis of diverse vehicular and...

Approaches for Synthesis and Deployment of Controller Models on Automated Vehicles for Car-following in Mixed Autonomy

Bhadani, Rahul
Bunting, Matthew
Nice, Matthew
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2023

This paper describes the software design patterns and vehicle interfaces that were employed to transition vehicle controllers from simulation environments to open-road field experiments. The approach relies on a life cycle that utilizes model-based design and code generation, along with agile software development, and both software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing, with additional safety margins. Autonomous designs should consider the dynamics of mixed autonomy in traffic to safely operate among humans. The software that provides a vehicle’s behavior intelligence is often developed...

Parameter Estimation for Decoding Sensor Signals

Nice, Matthew
Bunting, Matthew
Zachár, Gergely
Bhadani, Rahul
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2023

This paper introduces a parameter estimation approach for decoding digital sensor signals in a cyber-physical system. For unknown or not fully characterized digital sensor data, it can be difficult to decipher a desired signal from background or noise. In a cyber-physical system with networked sensors, we can leverage knowledge of the physical system to inform the decoding of the digital signals. This work in progress is a case study on deciphering commercial vehicle on-board sensor networks that communicate through the Controller Area Network (CAN). By understanding the stock vehicle...

Public–Private Partnerships in Fostering Outer Space Innovations

Rausser, Gordon
Choi, Elliot
Bayen, Alexandre
2023

As public and private institutions recognize the role of space exploration as a catalyst for economic growth, various areas of innovation are expected to emerge as drivers of the space economy. These include space transportation, in-space manufacturing, bioproduction, in-space agriculture, nuclear launch, and propulsion systems, as well as satellite services and their maintenance. However, the current nature of space as an open-access resource and global commons presents a systemic risk for exuberant competition for space goods and services, which may result in a “tragedy of the commons”...

So You Think You Can Track?

Gloudemans, Derek A.
Zachár, Gergely
Wang, Yanbing
Ji, Junyi
Nice, Matthew
Bayen, Alexandre
2024

This work introduces a multi-camera tracking dataset consisting of 234 hours of video data recorded concurrently from 234 overlapping HD cameras covering a 4.2 mile stretch of 8-10 lane interstate highway near Nashville, TN. The video is recorded during a period of high traffic density with 500+ objects typically visible within the scene and typical object longevities of 3-15 minutes. GPS trajectories from 270 vehicle passes through the scene are manually corrected in the video data to provide a set of ground-truth trajectories for recall-oriented tracking metrics, and object...

Car-Following Models: A Multidisciplinary Review

Zhang, Tianya Terry
Jin, Peter J.
McQuade, Sean T.
Bayen, Alexandre
Piccoli, Benedetto
2024

Car-following (CF) algorithms are crucial components of traffic simulations and have been integrated into many production vehicles equipped with Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS). Insights from the model of car-following behavior help researchers to understand the causes of various macro phenomena that arise from interactions between pairs of vehicles. Car-following Models encompass multiple disciplines, including traffic engineering, physics, dynamic system control, cognitive science, machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper presents an extensive...