Path Planning and Tracking Control for Parking via Soft Actor-Critic Under Non-Ideal Scenarios

Parking in a small parking lot within limited space poses a difficult task. It often leads to deviations between the final parking posture and the target posture. These deviations can lead to partial occupancy of adjacent parking lots, which poses a safety threat to vehicles parked in these parking lots. However, previous studies have not addressed this issue. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the impact of parking deviation of existing vehicles next to the target parking lot(PDEVNTPL) on the automatic ego vehicle(AEV) parking, in terms of safety, comfort, accuracy, and efficiency of parking. A segmented parking training framework(SPTF) based on soft actor-critic(SAC) is proposed to improve parking performance. In the proposed method, the SAC algorithm incorporates strategy entropy into the objective function, to enable the AEV to learn parking strategies based on a more comprehensive understanding of the environment. Additionally, the SPTF simplifies complex parking tasks to maintain the high performance of deep reinforcement learning(DRL). The experimental results reveal that the PDEVNTPL has a detrimental influence on the AEV parking in terms of safety, accuracy, and comfort, leading to reductions of more than 27%, 54%, and 26%respectively. However, the SAC-based SPTF effectively mitigates this impact, resulting in a considerable increase in the parking success rate from 71% to 93%. Furthermore, the heading angle deviation is significantly reduced from 2.25 degrees to 0.43degrees.

Pavement Cracks Coupled With Shadows:A New Shadow-Crack Dataset and A Shadow-Removal-Oriented Crack Detection Approach

Automatic pavement crack detection is a critical task for maintaining the pavement stability and driving safety.The task is challenging because the shadows on the pavement may have similar intensity with the crack,which interfere with the crack detection performance.Till to the present,there still lacks efficient algorithm models and training datasets to deal with the interference brought by the shadows.To fill in the gap,we made several contributions as follows.First,we proposed a new pavement shadow and crack dataset,which contains a variety of shadow and pavement pixel size combinations.It also covers all common cracks(linear cracks and network cracks),placing higher demands on crack detection methods.Second,we designed a two-step shadow-removal-oriented crack detection approach:SROCD,which improves the performance of the algorithm by first removing the shadow and then detecting it.In addition to shadows,the method can cope with other noise disturbances.Third,we explored the mechanism of how shadows affect crack detection.Based on this mechanism,we propose a data augmentation method based on the difference in brightness values,which can adapt to brightness changes caused by seasonal and weather changes.Finally,we introduced a residual feature augmentation algorithm to detect small cracks that can predict sudden disasters,and the algorithm improves the performance of the model overall.We compare our method with the state-of-the-art methods on existing pavement crack datasets and the shadow-crack dataset,and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Safe Efficient Policy Optimization Algorithm for Unsignalized Intersection

Unsignalized intersections pose a challenge for autonomous vehicles that must decide how to navigate them safely and efficiently.This paper proposes a reinforcement learning(RL)method for autonomous vehicles to navigate unsignalized intersections safely and efficiently.The method uses a semantic scene representation to handle variable numbers of vehicles and a universal reward function to facilitate stable learning.A collision risk function is designed to penalize unsafe actions and guide the agent to avoid them.A scalable policy optimization algorithm is introduced to improve data efficiency and safety for vehicle learning at intersections.The algorithm employs experience replay to overcome the on-policy limitation of proximal policy optimization and incorporates the collision risk constraint into the policy optimization problem.The proposed safe RL algorithm can balance the trade-off between vehicle traffic safety and policy learning efficiency.Simulated intersection scenarios with different traffic situations are used to test the algorithm and demonstrate its high success rates and low collision rates under different traffic conditions.The algorithm shows the potential of RL for enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems at unsignalized intersections.

Development of optimal speed trajectory control strategy for electric vehicles to suppress battery aging

In order to suppress the battery aging of electric vehicles(EVs),a multi-objective optimization function is established to describe the battery aging behavior based on a high-precision battery aging model,and the state–space equation is then constructed to reveal the intrinsic relationship between vehicle speed,acceleration,and battery state-of-charge(SOC).The constructed optimization model is solved by using a sequential quadratic programming(SQP)algorithm,and based on the model predictive control(MPC)theory,the efficient real-time control of vehicle speed is achieved.Simulation results show that the developed strategy extends the battery life by 10.33%compared to the baseline strategy when the traffic flow is not involved.In the case of involving the traffic flow,the optimization results of battery aging improves as the look-ahead time period increases,while the computational burden increases.The results show that the developed strategy reduces the battery aging of the target vehicle by 33.02%compared to the preceding vehicle while meeting the real-time requirement.