Myounggyu Won

Lokesh Chandra Das, Dipankar Dasgupta, Myounggyu Won

Dynamic wireless charging (DWC) is an emerging technology that allows electric vehicles (EVs) to be wirelessly charged while in motion. It is gaining significant momentum as it can potentially address the range limitation issue for EVs. However, due to significant power loss caused by wireless power transfer, improving charging efficiency remains as a major challenge for DWC systems. This paper presents the first LSTM-based vehicle motion control system for DWC designed to maximize charging efficiency. The dynamics of the electromagnetic field generated by the transmitter coils of a DWC system are modeled based on a multi-layer LSTM. The LSTM model is used to make a prediction of the lateral position where the electromagnetic strength is expected to be maximal and to control the EV motion accordingly to optimize charging efficiency. Simulations were conducted to demonstrate that our LSTM-based approach achieves by up to 162.3% higher charging efficiency compared with state-of-the-art vehicle motion control systems focused on keeping an EV in the center of lane.

Jibran Ali Abbasi, Navid Mohammad Imran, Lokesh Chandra Das et al.

The pedestrian crossing intention prediction problem is to estimate whether or not the target pedestrian will cross the street. State-of-the-art techniques heavily depend on visual data acquired through the front camera of the ego-vehicle to make a prediction of the pedestrian's crossing intention. Hence, the efficiency of current methodologies tends to decrease notably in situations where visual input is imprecise, for instance, when the distance between the pedestrian and ego-vehicle is considerable or the illumination levels are inadequate. To address the limitation, in this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the first-of-its-kind pedestrian crossing intention prediction model based on integration of motion sensor data gathered through the smartwatch (or smartphone) of the pedestrian. We propose an innovative machine learning framework that effectively integrates motion sensor data with visual input to enhance the predictive accuracy significantly, particularly in scenarios where visual data may be unreliable. Moreover, we perform an extensive data collection process and introduce the first pedestrian intention prediction dataset that features synchronized motion sensor data. The dataset comprises 255 video clips that encompass diverse distances and lighting conditions. We trained our model using the widely-used JAAD and our own datasets and compare the performance with a state-of-the-art model. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art method, particularly in cases where the distance between the pedestrian and the observer is considerable (more than 70 meters) and the lighting conditions are inadequate.

Yassine Ibork, Nhat Ha Nguyen, Myounggyu Won et al.

We present a priority-aware intelligent lane change advisory system based on multi-agent federated reinforcement learning, namely PALCAS, for autonomous vehicles (AVs). While existing lane-change approaches typically focus on single-agent systems or centralized multi-agent systems, we introduce a federated reinforcement learning-based multi-agent lane change system prioritizing lane changing based on vehicle destination urgency. PALCAS incorporates a novel priority-aware safe lane-change reward function to enable judicious lane-change decisions in both mandatory and discretionary scenarios. PALCAS leverages the parameterized deep Q-network (PDQN) algorithm to facilitate effective cooperation among agents, enabling both lateral and longitudinal motion controls of AVs. Extensive simulations conducted using the SUMO traffic simulator and Mosaic V2X communication framework demonstrate that PALCAS significantly improves traffic efficiency, driving safety, comfort, destination arrival rates, and merging success rates compared to baseline methods.

Navid Mohammad Imran, Myounggyu Won

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones (VRPD) seeks to optimize the routing paths for both trucks and drones, where the trucks are responsible for delivering parcels to customer locations, and the drones are dispatched from these trucks for parcel delivery, subsequently being retrieved by the trucks. Given the NP-Hard complexity of VRPD, numerous heuristic approaches have been introduced. However, improving solution quality and reducing computation time remain significant challenges. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of heuristic methods designed for solving VRPD, distilling and standardizing them into core elements. We then develop a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is seamlessly integrated with the heuristic solution components, establishing a set of universal principles for incorporating the RL framework with heuristic strategies in an aim to improve both the solution quality and computation speed. This integration has been applied to a state-of-the-art heuristic solution for VRPD, showcasing the substantial benefits of incorporating the RL framework. Our evaluation results demonstrated that the heuristic solution incorporated with our RL framework not only elevated the quality of solutions but also achieved rapid computation speeds, especially when dealing with extensive customer locations.

Lokesh Das, Myounggyu Won

We present a novel adaptive cruise control (ACC) system namely SAINT-ACC: {S}afety-{A}ware {Int}elligent {ACC} system (SAINT-ACC) that is designed to achieve simultaneous optimization of traffic efficiency, driving safety, and driving comfort through dynamic adaptation of the inter-vehicle gap based on deep reinforcement learning (RL). A novel dual RL agent-based approach is developed to seek and adapt the optimal balance between traffic efficiency and driving safety/comfort by effectively controlling the driving safety model parameters and inter-vehicle gap based on macroscopic and microscopic traffic information collected from dynamically changing and complex traffic environments. Results obtained through over 12,000 simulation runs with varying traffic scenarios and penetration rates demonstrate that SAINT-ACC significantly enhances traffic flow, driving safety and comfort compared with a state-of-the-art approach.

Myounggyu Won

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many applications. The limited flight time of UAVs, however, still remains as a major challenge. Although numerous approaches have been developed to recharge the battery of UAVs effectively, little is known about optimal methodologies to deploy charging stations. In this paper, we address the charging station deployment problem with an aim to find the optimal number and locations of charging stations such that the system performance is maximized. We show that the problem is NP-Hard and propose UBAT, a heuristic framework based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the problem. Additionally, a suite of algorithms are designed to enhance the execution time and the quality of the solutions for UBAT. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that UBAT effectively performs multi-objective optimization of generation of UAV trajectories and placement of charging stations that are within 8.3% and 7.3% of the true optimal solutions, respectively.

Myounggyu Won, Sayan Sahu, Kyung-Joon Park

A traffic monitoring system (TMS) is an integral part of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It is an essential tool for traffic analysis and planning. One of the biggest challenges is, however, the high cost especially in covering the huge rural road network. In this paper, we propose to address the problem by developing a novel TMS called DeepWiTraffic. DeepWiTraffic is a low-cost, portable, and non-intrusive solution that is built only with two WiFi transceivers. It exploits the unique WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) of passing vehicles to perform detection and classification of vehicles. Spatial and temporal correlations of CSI amplitude and phase data are identified and analyzed using a machine learning technique to classify vehicles into five different types: motorcycles, passenger vehicles, SUVs, pickup trucks, and large trucks. A large amount of CSI data and ground-truth video data are collected over a month period from a real-world two-lane rural roadway to validate the effectiveness of DeepWiTraffic. The results validate that DeepWiTraffic is an effective TMS with the average detection accuracy of 99.4% and the average classification accuracy of 91.1% in comparison with state-of-the-art non-intrusive TMSs.

Myounggyu Won, Haitham Alsaadan, Yongsoon Eun

With ever-increasing number of car-mounted electric devices and their complexity, audio classification is increasingly important for the automotive industry as a fundamental tool for human-device interactions. Existing approaches for audio classification, however, fall short as the unique and dynamic audio characteristics of in-vehicle environments are not appropriately taken into account. In this paper, we develop an audio classification system that classifies an audio stream into music, speech, speech+music, and noise, adaptably depending on driving environments including highway, local road, crowded city, and stopped vehicle. More than 420 minutes of audio data including various genres of music, speech, speech+music, and noise are collected from diverse driving environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the average classification accuracy up to 166%, and 64% for speech, and speech+music, respectively, compared with a non-adaptive approach in our experimental settings.