Patrick Klose

Patrick Klose, Rudolf Mester

In the field of Autonomous Driving, the system controlling the vehicle can be seen as an agent acting in a complex environment and thus naturally fits into the modern framework of Reinforcement Learning. However, learning to drive can be a challenging task and current results are often restricted to simplified driving environments. To advance the field, we present a method to adaptively restrict the action space of the agent according to its current driving situation and show that it can be used to swiftly learn to drive in a realistic environment based on the Deep Q-Network algorithm.

Patrick Klose, Rudolf Mester

Using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) can be a promising approach to handle various tasks in the field of (simulated) autonomous driving. However, recent publications mainly consider learning in unusual driving environments. This paper presents Driving School for Autonomous Agents (DSA^2), a software for validating DRL algorithms in more usual driving environments based on artificial and realistic road networks. We also present the results of applying DSA^2 for handling the task of driving on a straight road while regulating the velocity of one vehicle according to different speed limits.