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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mares, Lachlan, Podgorski, Stefan, Reid, Ian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18462
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author Mares, Lachlan
Podgorski, Stefan
Reid, Ian
author_facet Mares, Lachlan
Podgorski, Stefan
Reid, Ian
contents This work presents the experiments and solution outline for our teams winning submission in the Learn To Race Autonomous Racing Virtual Challenge 2022 hosted by AIcrowd. The objective of the Learn-to-Race competition is to push the boundary of autonomous technology, with a focus on achieving the safety benefits of autonomous driving. In the description the competition is framed as a reinforcement learning (RL) challenge. We focused our initial efforts on implementation of Soft Actor Critic (SAC) variants. Our goal was to learn non-trivial control of the race car exclusively from visual and geometric features, directly mapping pixels to control actions. We made suitable modifications to the default reward policy aiming to promote smooth steering and acceleration control. The framework for the competition provided real time simulation, meaning a single episode (learning experience) is measured in minutes. Instead of pursuing parallelisation of episodes we opted to explore a more traditional approach in which the visual perception was processed (via learned operators) and fed into rule-based controllers. Such a system, while not as academically "attractive" as a pixels-to-actions approach, results in a system that requires less training, is more explainable, generalises better and is easily tuned and ultimately out-performed all other agents in the competition by a large margin.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learn 2 Rage: Experiencing The Emotional Roller Coaster That Is Reinforcement Learning
Mares, Lachlan
Podgorski, Stefan
Reid, Ian
Systems and Control
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
This work presents the experiments and solution outline for our teams winning submission in the Learn To Race Autonomous Racing Virtual Challenge 2022 hosted by AIcrowd. The objective of the Learn-to-Race competition is to push the boundary of autonomous technology, with a focus on achieving the safety benefits of autonomous driving. In the description the competition is framed as a reinforcement learning (RL) challenge. We focused our initial efforts on implementation of Soft Actor Critic (SAC) variants. Our goal was to learn non-trivial control of the race car exclusively from visual and geometric features, directly mapping pixels to control actions. We made suitable modifications to the default reward policy aiming to promote smooth steering and acceleration control. The framework for the competition provided real time simulation, meaning a single episode (learning experience) is measured in minutes. Instead of pursuing parallelisation of episodes we opted to explore a more traditional approach in which the visual perception was processed (via learned operators) and fed into rule-based controllers. Such a system, while not as academically "attractive" as a pixels-to-actions approach, results in a system that requires less training, is more explainable, generalises better and is easily tuned and ultimately out-performed all other agents in the competition by a large margin.
title Learn 2 Rage: Experiencing The Emotional Roller Coaster That Is Reinforcement Learning
topic Systems and Control
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18462