mctr
MCTR: Midpoint Corrected Triangulation for Autonomous Racing via Digital Twin Simulation in CARLA
Ye, Junhao, Hu, Cheng, Wang, Yiqin, Huang, Weizhan, Baumann, Nicolas, He, Jie, Qu, Meixun, Xie, Lei, Su, Hongye
In autonomous racing, reactive controllers eliminate the computational burden of the full See-Think-Act autonomy stack by directly mapping sensor inputs to control actions. This bypasses the need for explicit localization and trajectory planning. A widely adopted baseline in this category is the Follow-The-Gap method, which performs trajectory planning using LiDAR data. Building on FTG, the Delaunay Triangulation-based Racing algorithm introduces further enhancements. However, DTR's use of circumcircles for trajectory generation often results in insufficiently smooth paths, ultimately degrading performance. Additionally, the commonly used F1TENTH-simulator for autonomous racing competitions lacks support for 3D LiDAR perception, limiting its effectiveness in realistic testing. To address these challenges, this work proposes the MCTR algorithm. MCTR improves trajectory smoothness through the use of Curvature Corrected Moving Average and implements a digital twin system within the CARLA simulator to validate the algorithm's robustness under 3D LiDAR perception. The proposed algorithm has been thoroughly validated through both simulation and real-world vehicle experiments.
Bounding-Box Inference for Error-Aware Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Talvitie, Erin J., Shao, Zilei, Li, Huiying, Hu, Jinghan, Boerma, Jacob, Zhao, Rory, Wang, Xintong
In model-based reinforcement learning, simulated experiences from the learned model are often treated as equivalent to experience from the real environment. However, when the model is inaccurate, it can catastrophically interfere with policy learning. Alternatively, the agent might learn about the model's accuracy and selectively use it only when it can provide reliable predictions. We empirically explore model uncertainty measures for selective planning and show that best results require distribution insensitive inference to estimate the uncertainty over model-based updates. To that end, we propose and evaluate bounding-box inference, which operates on bounding-boxes around sets of possible states and other quantities. We find that bounding-box inference can reliably support effective selective planning.