To enhance the ability for vehicle platoons to respond to emergency scenarios, a platoon distribution reorganization decision-making framework is proposed. This framework contains platoon distribution layer, vehicle cooperative decision-making layer and vehicle planning and control layer. Firstly, a reinforcement-learning-based platoon distribution model is presented, where a risk potential field is established to quantitatively assess driving risks, and a reward function tailored to the platoon reorganization process is constructed. Then, a coalition-game-based vehicle cooperative decision-making model is put forward, modeling the cooperative relationships among vehicles through dividing coalitions and generating the optimal decision results for each vehicle. Additionally, a novel graph-theory-based Platoon Disposition Index (PDI) is incorporated into the game reward function to measure the platoon's distribution state during the reorganization process, in order to accelerating the reorganization process. Finally, the validation of the proposed framework is conducted in two high-risk scenarios under random traffic flows. The results show that, compared to the baseline models, the proposed method can significantly reduce the collision rate and improve driving efficiency. Moreover, the model with PDI can significantly decrease the platoon formation reorganization time and improve the reorganization efficiency.

Recently, there has been a significant escalation in both academic and industrial commitment towards the development of autonomous driving systems (ADSs). A number of simulation testing approaches have been proposed to generate diverse driving scenarios for ADS testing. However, scenarios generated by these previous approaches are static and lack interactions between the EGO vehicle and the NPC vehicles, resulting in a large amount of time on average to find violation scenarios. Besides, a large number of the violations they found are caused by aggressive behaviors of NPC vehicles, revealing none bugs of ADS. In this work, we propose the concept of adversarial NPC vehicles and introduce AdvFuzz, a novel simulation testing approach, to generate adversarial scenarios on main lanes (e.g., urban roads and highways). AdvFuzz allows NPC vehicles to dynamically interact with the EGO vehicle and regulates the behaviors of NPC vehicles, finding more violation scenarios caused by the EGO vehicle more quickly. We compare AdvFuzz with a random approach and three state-of-the-art scenario-based testing approaches. Our experiments demonstrate that AdvFuzz can generate 198.34% more violation scenarios compared to the other four approaches in 12 hours and increase the proportion of violations caused by the EGO vehicle to 87.04%, which is more than 7 times that of other approaches. Additionally, AdvFuzz is at least 92.21% faster in finding one violation caused by the EGO vehicle than that of the other approaches.

Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) require diverse and safety-critical traffic scenarios for effective training and testing, but the existing data generation methods struggle to provide flexibility and scalability. We propose LASER, a novel framework that leverage large language models (LLMs) to conduct traffic simulations based on natural language inputs. The framework operates in two stages: it first generates scripts from user-provided descriptions and then executes them using autonomous agents in real time. Validated in the CARLA simulator, LASER successfully generates complex, on-demand driving scenarios, significantly improving ADS training and testing data generation. To make a great film, you need three things-the script, the script and the script.

For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn't want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point? Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021.

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex and multimodal trajectory distributions for decision-making and control. Reward-gradient guided denoising has been recently proposed to generate trajectories that maximize both a differentiable reward function and the likelihood under the data distribution captured by a diffusion model. Reward-gradient guided denoising requires a differentiable reward function fitted to both clean and noised samples, limiting its applicability as a general trajectory optimizer. In this paper, we propose DiffusionES, a method that combines gradient-free optimization with trajectory denoising to optimize black-box non-differentiable objectives while staying in the data manifold. Diffusion-ES samples trajectories during evolutionary search from a diffusion model and scores them using a black-box reward function. It mutates high-scoring trajectories using a truncated diffusion process that applies a small number of noising and denoising steps, allowing for much more efficient exploration of the solution space. We show that DiffusionES achieves state-of-the-art performance on nuPlan, an established closed-loop planning benchmark for autonomous driving. Diffusion-ES outperforms existing sampling-based planners, reactive deterministic or diffusion-based policies, and reward-gradient guidance. Additionally, we show that unlike prior guidance methods, our method can optimize non-differentiable language-shaped reward functions generated by few-shot LLM prompting. When guided by a human teacher that issues instructions to follow, our method can generate novel, highly complex behaviors, such as aggressive lane weaving, which are not present in the training data. This allows us to solve the hardest nuPlan scenarios which are beyond the capabilities of existing trajectory optimization methods and driving policies.

Various methods have been proposed for utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) in autonomous driving. One strategy of using LLMs for autonomous driving involves inputting surrounding objects as text prompts to the LLMs, along with their coordinate and velocity information, and then outputting the subsequent movements of the vehicle. When using LLMs for such purposes, capabilities such as spatial recognition and planning are essential. In particular, two foundational capabilities are required: (1) spatial-aware decision making, which is the ability to recognize space from coordinate information and make decisions to avoid collisions, and (2) the ability to adhere to traffic rules. However, quantitative research has not been conducted on how accurately different types of LLMs can handle these problems. In this study, we quantitatively evaluated these two abilities of LLMs in the context of autonomous driving. Furthermore, to conduct a Proof of Concept (POC) for the feasibility of implementing these abilities in actual vehicles, we developed a system that uses LLMs to drive a vehicle.

Earlier this month, a woman in San Francisco was hit by a car while crossing the street. Had the story ended there, it would have been just another one of the small tragedies that occur on America's roads, where roughly 100 people die every day. She was hit again, this time by a robotaxi from the start-up Cruise. The car braked, coming to a stop with her pinned underneath. Then it started driving again, dragging the woman along with it for an agonizing 20 more feet.

Recent advancements in autonomous driving have relied on data-driven approaches, which are widely adopted but face challenges including dataset bias, overfitting, and uninterpretability. Drawing inspiration from the knowledge-driven nature of human driving, we explore the question of how to instill similar capabilities into autonomous driving systems and summarize a paradigm that integrates an interactive environment, a driver agent, as well as a memory component to address this question. Leveraging large language models with emergent abilities, we propose the DiLu framework, which combines a Reasoning and a Reflection module to enable the system to perform decision-making based on common-sense knowledge and evolve continuously. Extensive experiments prove DiLu's capability to accumulate experience and demonstrate a significant advantage in generalization ability over reinforcement learning-based methods. Moreover, DiLu is able to directly acquire experiences from real-world datasets which highlights its potential to be deployed on practical autonomous driving systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to instill knowledge-driven capability into autonomous driving systems from the perspective of how humans drive.

Engineering knowledge-based (or expert) systems require extensive manual effort and domain knowledge. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained using an enormous amount of cross-domain knowledge, it becomes possible to automate such engineering processes. This paper presents an empirical automation and semi-automation framework for domain knowledge distillation using prompt engineering and the LLM ChatGPT. We assess the framework empirically in the autonomous driving domain and present our key observations. In our implementation, we construct the domain knowledge ontology by "chatting" with ChatGPT. The key finding is that while fully automated domain ontology construction is possible, human supervision and early intervention typically improve efficiency and output quality as they lessen the effects of response randomness and the butterfly effect. We, therefore, also develop a web-based distillation assistant enabling supervision and flexible intervention at runtime. We hope our findings and tools could inspire future research toward revolutionizing the engineering of knowledge-based systems across application domains.

The 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E is equipped with the latest semi-autonomous BlueCruise highway driving system that can drive the car under certain circumstances better than the original version. The Ford Mustang Mach-E has been going to driving school. The electric SUV is one of the models that is available with Ford's BlueCruise semi-autonomous adaptive cruise control system. The feature is similar to GM's Super Cruise and allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals while the car controls its own speed and steers within a highway lane. Facial recognition technology makes sure that the drivers are keeping their eyes on the road and are ready to take back control in case of emergency.