Title:
Autonomous rally racing with AutoRally and model predictive control

dc.contributor.advisor Rehg, James M.
dc.contributor.advisor Theodorou, Evangelos A.
dc.contributor.author Goldfain, Brian
dc.contributor.committeeMember Tsitras, Panagiotis
dc.contributor.committeeMember Balch, Tucker
dc.contributor.committeeMember Eustice, Ryan
dc.contributor.department Interactive Computing
dc.date.accessioned 2020-09-08T12:40:56Z
dc.date.available 2020-09-08T12:40:56Z
dc.date.created 2019-08
dc.date.issued 2019-07-30
dc.date.submitted August 2019
dc.date.updated 2020-09-08T12:40:56Z
dc.description.abstract The ability to conduct experiments in the real world is a critical step for roboticists working to create autonomous systems that achieve human-level task performance. Self-driving vehicles are a domain that has received significant attention in recent years, in part because of their potential societal benefit. However, there is still a significant performance gap between human drivers and self-driving vehicles. The task of off-road rally racing is an especially difficult driving task where many of the unsolved challenges occur frequently. This thesis opens the domain of autonomous rally racing to researchers and conducts the first rally race between autonomous and human drivers. We created the AutoRally platform, a robust, scaled self-driving vehicle and demonstrated AutoRally driven at high speed on a dirt track by the model predictive path integral controller. The controller optimizes control plans on-the-fly onboard the robot using a dynamics model learned from data and a hand-coded task description, also called a cost function. To enable rally racing, an additional layer of cost function optimization, that operates on the time scale of lap times, was created to replace the hand-coded cost function with one adapted through interactions with the system. We explore representations and optimization methods for the racing cost function, and then compare driving performance to human and autonomous drivers using the AutoRally platform at the Georgia Tech Autonomous Racing Facility
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/63529
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Autonomous racing
dc.subject Cost function optimization
dc.subject Self-driving vehicle
dc.title Autonomous rally racing with AutoRally and model predictive control
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Theodorou, Evangelos A.
local.contributor.advisor Rehg, James M.
local.contributor.corporatename College of Computing
local.contributor.corporatename School of Interactive Computing
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relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication aac3f010-e629-4d08-8276-81143eeaf5cc
thesis.degree.level Doctoral
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