Learning How to Avoiding Obstacles for End-to-End Driving with Conditional Imitation Learning

Obstacle avoiding is one of the most complex tasks for autonomous driving systems, which was also ignored by many cutting-edge end-to-end learning-based methods. The difficulties stem from the integrated process of detection and interpretation of environment and obstacles and generation of proper behaviors. We make the use of CARLA, a simulator for autonomous driving research, and collect massive human drivers' reactions to obstacles on road subjecting to given driving commands, i.e. follow, go straight, turn left and turn right for about 6 hours. A behavior-Cloning neural network architecture is proposed with the modified loss that enlarge the effects of errors for steer, which indicates the benefit to high an accuracy. We found the data augmentation of the image is crucial to the training of the proposed network. And a reasonable limit allows avoiding unexpected stop. The experiments demonstrate 3 obstacle avoidance cases: for the same type as the training dataset, other automobile and two-wheeled vehicles. Finally, the CARLA benchmark is also tested.