Off-Road Obstacle Avoidance through End-to-End Learning

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 2005)

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Authors

Urs Muller, Jan Ben, Eric Cosatto, Beat Flepp, Yann Cun

Abstract

We describe a vision-based obstacle avoidance system for off-road mobile robots. The system is trained from end to end to map raw in put images to steering angles. It is trained in supervised mode to predict the steering angles provided by a human driver during training r uns collected in a wide variety of terrains, weather conditions, lighting conditions, and obstacle types. The robot is a 50cm off-road truck, with two f orwardpointing wireless color cameras. A remote computer process es the video and controls the robot via radio. The learning system is a lar ge 6-layer convolutional network whose input is a single left/right pair of unprocessed low-resolution images. The robot exhibits an excellent ability to detect obstacles and navigate around them in real time at speeds of 2 m/s.