Autonomous Vehicles

In-Distribution Barrier Functions: Self-Supervised Policy Filters that Avoid Out-of-Distribution States

Learning-based control approaches have shown great promise in performing complex tasks directly from high-dimensional perception data for real robotic systems. Nonetheless, the learned controllers can behave unexpectedly if the trajectories of the …

RAP: Risk-Aware Prediction for Robust Planning

Robust planning in interactive scenarios requires predicting the uncertain future to make risk-aware decisions. Unfortunately, due to long-tail safety-critical events, the risk is often under-estimated by finite-sampling approximations of …

Is Anyone There? Learning a Planner Contingent on Perceptual Uncertainty

Robots in complex multi-agent environments should reason about the intentions of observed and currently unobserved agents. In this paper, we present a new learning-based method for prediction and planning in complex multi-agent environments where the …

Control-Aware Prediction Objectives for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicle software is typically structured as a modular pipeline of individual components (e.g., perception, prediction, and planning) to help separate concerns into interpretable sub-tasks. Even when end-to-end training is possible, each …

Heterogeneous-Agent Trajectory Forecasting Incorporating Class Uncertainty

Reasoning about the future behavior of other agents is critical to safe robot navigation. The multiplicity of plausible futures is further amplified by the uncertainty inherent to agent state estimation from data, including positions, velocities, and …

Contingencies from Observations: Tractable Contingency Planning with Learned Behavior Models

Humans have a remarkable ability to make decisions by accurately reasoning about future events, including the future behaviors and states of mind of other agents. Consider driving a car through a busy intersection, it is necessary to reason about the …

Can Autonomous Vehicles Identify, Recover From, and Adapt to Distribution Shifts?

Out-of-training-distribution (OOD) scenarios are a common challenge of learning agents at deployment, typically leading to arbitrary deductions and poorly-informed decisions. In principle, detection of and adaptation to OOD scenes can mitigate their …

PRECOG: PREdiction Conditioned On Goals in Visual Multi-Agent Settings

Forecasting the motion of multiple interacting vehicles. When one is autonmous, conditioning on its goals helps better-predict the motions of other vehicles.

Deep Imitative Models for Flexible Inference, Planning, and Control

Imitation Learning (IL) is an appealing approach to learn desirable autonomous behavior. However, directing IL to achieve arbitrary goals is difficult. In contrast, planning-based algorithms use dynamics models and reward functions to achieve goals. …

Concrete Problems for Autonomous Vehicle Safety: Advantages of Bayesian Deep Learning

Autonomous vehicle (AV) software is typically composed of a pipeline of individual components, linking sensor inputs to motor outputs. Erroneous component outputs propagate downstream, hence safe AV software must consider the ultimate effect of each …