Road Detection for Reinforcement Learning Based Autonomous Car

Human mistakes in traffic often have terrible consequences. The long-awaited introduction of self-driving vehicles may solve many of the problems with traffic, but much research is still needed before cars are fully autonomous. In this paper, we propose a new Road Detection algorithm using online supervised learning based on a Neural Network architecture. This algorithm is designed to support a Reinforcement Learning algorithm (for example, the standard Proximal Policy Optimization or PPO) by detecting when the car is in an adverse condition. Specifically, the PPO gets a penalty whenever the virtual automobile gets stuck or drives off the road with any of its four wheels. Initial experiments show significantly improved results for PPO when using our Road Detection algorithm, as compared to not using any form of Road Detection. In fact, without this detection algorithm, the vehicle often gets into non-terminating loops (for example, driving into the dividers, getting stuck, or driving into a pit).