Autonomous Driving through Extremely Dynamic-Complex Traffic-Dynamics in India

Autonomous driving through extremely-tight-dynamic environments with complex, stochastic, and adversarial traffic-dynamics, or simply through an absolute chaos, on sub-urban unstructured roads in India. This kind of traffic and environment has never been attempted in the history of #autonomousdriving. There were no traffic-rules to abide by on this road, other than to perform a left-sided avoidance, if the other obstacles follow the same, else the vehicle will have to change its plan in a stochastic manner, in several of the adversarial multi-agent negotiation settings encountered throughout the autonomous navigation. This demos tested our motion planning and decision making framework to its limits, showcasing its robustness in negotiating such traffic-dynamics with ease. This demo was done on mostly a very narrow road, suited mostly for one-way navigation, but as is customary in India, bidirectional traffic is active on such narrow roads. It can be seen throughout navigation that the incoming vehicles didn’t allow any gaps for our #autonomousvehicles , forcing it to negotiate passively-aggressively its own path through the chaos. Furthermore, obstacles overtaking us didn’t follow any rules either, and zig-zagged and moved in crisscross fashion, challenging our motion and behaviour planning software, which negotiated all such scenarios with ease. There were only two points where our vehicle came to halt, when two girls on a two-wheeler didn’t stop and just kept on navigating, despite our vehicle being closer to the narrow passage and it having the right of way, and despite a bike being parked over there by someone, making it a very challenging scenario both for the humans and for the decision making autonomous agent(s). This demo was done in the Awadhpuri area, on the Durga Mata road. This framework was last shown in relatively much sparser traffic in our Kankali Kali Mata demo last month. It is being scaled further with deep unsupervised and #reinforcementlearning , and in the coming weeks, it will play a critical role in our endeavour to solving the Level-4 autonomy problem by the end of the year. This kind of traffic negotiation has never been attempted by any autonomous driving company ever. While a 90-degree turn is usually discussed as a corner case in the West, our autonomous vehicle negotiated a blind 90-degree corner, with traffic, with ease. #deeplearning #machinelearning #selfdrivingcars #india