Robust Autonomous Vehicle Pursuit Without Expert Steering Labels

In this work, we present a learning method for both lateral and longitudinal motion control of an ego-vehicle for the task of vehicle pursuit. The car being controlled does not have a pre-defined route, rather it reactively adapts to follow a target vehicle while maintaining a safety distance. To train our model, we do not rely on steering labels recorded from an expert driver, but effectively leverage a classical controller as an offline label generation tool. In addition, we account for the errors in the predicted control values, which can lead to a loss of tracking and catastrophic crashes of the controlled vehicle. To this end, we propose an effective data augmentation approach, which allows to train a network that is capable of handling different views of the target vehicle. During the pursuit, the target vehicle is firstly localized using a Convolutional Neural Network. The network takes a single RGB image along with cars' velocities and estimates target vehicle's pose with respect to the ego-vehicle. This information is then fed to a Multi-Layer Perceptron, which regresses the control commands for the ego-vehicle, namely throttle and steering angle. We extensively validate our approach using the CARLA simulator on a wide range of terrains. Our method demonstrates real-time performance, robustness to different scenarios including unseen trajectories and high route completion.