Quinlan Sykora

Quinlan Sykora, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun

In this paper we tackle the problem of routing multiple agents in a coordinated manner. This is a complex problem that has a wide range of applications in fleet management to achieve a common goal, such as mapping from a swarm of robots and ride sharing. Traditional methods are typically not designed for realistic environments hich contain sparsely connected graphs and unknown traffic, and are often too slow in runtime to be practical. In contrast, we propose a graph neural network based model that is able to perform multi-agent routing based on learned value iteration in a sparsely connected graph with dynamically changing traffic conditions. Moreover, our learned communication module enables the agents to coordinate online and adapt to changes more effectively. We created a simulated environment to mimic realistic mapping performed by autonomous vehicles with unknown minimum edge coverage and traffic conditions; our approach significantly outperforms traditional solvers both in terms of total cost and runtime. We also show that our model trained with only two agents on graphs with a maximum of 25 nodes can easily generalize to situations with more agents and/or nodes.

Keenan Burnett, Jingxing Qian, Xintong Du et al.

The SAE AutoDrive Challenge is a three-year collegiate competition to develop a self-driving car by 2020. The second year of the competition was held in June 2019 at MCity, a mock town built for self-driving car testing at the University of Michigan. Teams were required to autonomously navigate a series of intersections while handling pedestrians, traffic lights, and traffic signs. Zeus is aUToronto's winning entry in the AutoDrive Challenge. This article describes the system design and development of Zeus as well as many of the lessons learned along the way. This includes details on the team's organizational structure, sensor suite, software components, and performance at the Year 2 competition. With a team of mostly undergraduates and minimal resources, aUToronto has made progress towards a functioning self-driving vehicle, in just two years. This article may prove valuable to researchers looking to develop their own self-driving platform.

Qiyang Li, Xintong Du, Yizhou Huang et al.

Inspired by biological swarms, robotic swarms are envisioned to solve real-world problems that are difficult for individual agents. Biological swarms can achieve collective intelligence based on local interactions and simple rules; however, designing effective distributed policies for large-scale robotic swarms to achieve a global objective can be challenging. Although it is often possible to design an optimal centralized strategy for smaller numbers of agents, those methods can fail as the number of agents increases. Motivated by the growing success of machine learning, we develop a deep learning approach that learns distributed coordination policies from centralized policies. In contrast to traditional distributed control approaches, which are usually based on human-designed policies for relatively simple tasks, this learning-based approach can be adapted to more difficult tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach on two different tasks, the well-known rendezvous problem and a more difficult particle assignment problem. For the latter, no known distributed policy exists. From extensive simulations, it is shown that the performance of the learned coordination policies is comparable to the centralized policies, surpassing state-of-the-art distributed policies. Thereby, our proposed approach provides a promising alternative for real-world coordination problems that would be otherwise computationally expensive to solve or intangible to explore.