Data-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vehicle Trajectory Control

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pp. 894–901

Abstract

Advanced vehicle control is a fundamental building block in the development of autonomous driving systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to achieve control performance superior to classical approaches while keeping computational demands low during deployment. However, standard RL approaches like soft-actor critic (SAC) require extensive amounts of training data to be collected and are thus impractical for real-world application. To address this issue, we apply recently developed data-efficient deep RL methods to vehicle trajectory control. Our investigation focuses on three methods, so far unexplored for vehicle control: randomized ensemble double Q-learning (REDQ), probabilistic ensembles with trajectory sampling and model predictive path integral optimizer (PETS-MPPI), and model-based policy optimization (MBPO). We find that in the case of trajectory control, the standard model-based RL formulation used in approaches like PETS-MPPI and MBPO is not suitable. We, therefore, propose a new formulation that splits dynamics prediction and vehicle localization. Our benchmark study on the CARLA simulator reveals that the three identified data-efficient deep RL approaches learn control strategies on a par with or better than SAC, yet reduce the required number of environment interactions by more than one order of magnitude.

Authors 3

1. Bernd Frauenknecht Aachen Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering (DSME), RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany,52068

2. Tobias Ehlgen

   ZF Friedrichshafen (Germany)

   Affiliation as printed

   AI Lab Friedrichshafen, ZF Friedrichshafen AG,Friedrichshafen,Germany,88045

3. Sebastian Trimpe Aachen Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering (DSME), RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany,52068