Learning to drive as humans do: Reinforcement learning for autonomous navigation

This article introduces an approach aimed at enabling self-driving cars to emulate human-learned driving behavior. We propose a method where the navigation challenge of autonomous vehicles, from starting to ending positions, is framed as a series of decision-making problems encountered in various states negating the requirement for high-precision maps and routing systems. Utilizing high-quality images and sensor-derived state information, we design rewards to guide an agent's movement from the initial to the final destination. The soft actor-critic algorithm is employed to learn the optimal policy from the interaction between the agent and the environment, informed by these states and rewards. In an innovative approach, we apply the variational autoencoder technique to extract latent vectors from high-quality images, reconstructing a new state space with vehicle state vectors. This method reduces hardware requirements and enhances training efficiency and task success rates. Simulation tests conducted in the CARLA simulator demonstrate the superiority of our method over others. It enhances the intelligence of autonomous vehicles without the need for intermediate processes such as target detection, while concurrently reducing the hardware footprint, even though it may not perform as well as the currently available mature techniques.