FULL CONTENT OF THE PAPER ON SMART VEHICLES

INTECHO’18
MADRAS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
TITLE: DRIVERLESS CARS WITH DEEP LEARNING
Team members: Yamuna devi.R, Dharani Raveendran
Sri Manakula vinayagar engineering college
Department of Computer science
Puducherry.

INTRODUCTION FUNCTIONING OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE

Driverless technology is amazing. AV (Autonomous
vehicle) technologies can decrease the transportation cost
and increase accessibility to low-income households and
persons with mobility issues. This emerging technology also
has far-reaching applications and implications beyond all
current expectations. In comparison to the myriad of bad
behaviors a driver might exhibit behind the wheel, a
computer is actually an ideal motorist. Since 81 percent of
car crashes are the result of human error, computers would
take a lot of danger out of the equation entirely.Computers
use complicated algorithms to determine appropriate
stopping distance, distance from another vehicle and other
data that decreases the chances of car accidents
dramatically. There are no opportunities for a computer to
be "distracted", which is a leading cause of accidents in the
United States at present. Still, there are a few major
technology issues that need to be addressed before driverless
cars hit our markets and roads.
GPS (Global Positioning System) works alongside on-board
cameras and advanced mapping systems wherein each map
is highly detailed, down to identifying the height of the
curbs and the dimensions of the lane. Light Detecting and
Ranging (LIDAR) sensors bounce pulses of light off the
surroundings, creating a picture of potential hazards and
accurately determining the profile and distance of the
surrounding objects. Four radar sensors, mounted on the
front and the back of the vehicle, monitor the speed of the
objects around and help avoid collisions by sending signals
to apply brakes or move out of the way, as and when
applicable Cameras provide overlapping images of the
surroundings which help detect traffic lights, road signs,
track other vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and other objects
on the road after which the central computers build a real-
time image of the world, thereby manipulating and
influencing the functions of the car accordingly. Learning
algorithms fed into the central computer enable it to learn
from past experiences and act accordingly in future. It was
in the 1970s that automakers initially started turning to
electronics for better engine control. To that was added
other computerized features such as anti-lock functions,
brakes and power steering. Cars these days are already
equipped with sensors and cameras aiding drivers in their
decision making while their insides are loaded with data-
spewing operating systems. Currently, such automated
functions are controlled by a central unit called the ECU
(engine control unit).
PROBLEM STATEMENT
A decision making process that has to be implemented in a
self-driving car can be summarized as follows. It starts with
an awareness of the environment: Detecting obstacles, such
as a group of humans, animals or buildings, and also the
current context/situation of the car using external systems
(GPS, maps, street signs, etc.) or locally available
information (speed, direction, etc.). Various sensors have to
be used to collect all required information. Gaining detailed
information about obstacles would be a necessary step
before a decision can be made that maximizes
utility/minimizes damage. A computer program calculates
solutions and chooses the solution with the optimal
outcome. The self-driving car executes the calculated action
and the process repeats itself.
CURRENT ISSUES/CONSTRAINTS
SAFETY
CREEPY TROLLEY PROBLEM
In a simple formulation of the Trolley Problem, we imagine
a trolley hurtling toward a cluster of five people who are
standing on the track and facing certain death. By throwing
a switch, an observer can divert the trolley to a different
track where one person is standing, currently out of harm’s
way but certain to die because of the observer’s actions.
Self-driving cars at some point will have to wrestle with
situations akin to this. They’ll have to swerve to avoid
pedestrians or cyclists – but what if that imperils others?
Such as the occupant/owner of the self-driving vehicle?
Would you program a car to drive off the side of a mountain
road, sacrificing the occupant, if a school bus was careening
down the mountain in the wrong lane? Therefore, Computer
programmers have to decide how to program the vehicle and
how to write an algorithm for all these different kinds of
situations.
Driving in congested areas also remains a big challenge
regarding safety for self-driving cars, along with driving in
inclement weather, driving in congested areas at high speed,
making a left turn in congested traffic and understanding
human gestures.
COMMUNICATION
Computers will not be able to transmit information in areas
of poor reception. If competing driverless entities cannot
work together, one brand's SUV will not be able to warn
another's about the traffic ahead. There is also a question in
how much information will vehicles share with each other
without sacrificing the privacy of passengers. This leads into
another driverless car problem.
SECURITY
The threat of automotive cyberattacks will only loom larger
as society transitions to autonomous vehicles. But even
before autonomous vehicles become widespread, car
hacking is already a very real danger. Whether it is
privacy or control of the vehicle that is at risk, the
possibility of the vehicle being hacked is
frightening. Companies will need to be deliberate in
combating an opportunity for car-jackers to work wirelessly.
America” Act in Congress 103 in the United States is
intended to make hacking a vehicle, a criminal offense.
Introduced in July 2015, the bill looks to establish minimum
security levels for any vehicle software in contact with
physical driving controls. The bill also requires car
manufacturers to establish real time monitoring to detect,
report and prevent cyber-attacks. NHTSA is already
working on security protocols, trying to ensure that vehicles
can send and receive trusted messages and instructions and
has also welcomed the move of automakers in taking
responsibility for accidents involving their automobiles.
Volvo, Mercedes, and Google have already America” Act in
Congress 103 in the United States is intended to make
hacking a vehicle, a criminal offense. Introduced in July
2015, the bill looks to establish minimum security levels for
any vehicle software in contact with physical driving
controls. The bill also requires car manufacturers to
establish real time monitoring to detect, report and prevent
cyber-attacks. NHTSA is already working on security
protocols, trying to ensure that vehicles can send and receive
trusted messages and instructions and has also welcomed the
move of automakers in taking responsibility for accidents
involving their automobiles. Volvo, Mercedes, and Google
have already.
FUTURE PROCESS FLOW DUE TO THIS
SOLUTION
The dynamic between human drivers and autonomous
vehicles is complicated, but researchers at IBM
have patented a new cognitive system that could help
determine if and when a person—or the self-driving
system—should take control. It's based on a variety of
indicators, including factors like human fatigue and
emotional state, as well as the overall mechanical function
of the vehicle.
Onboard sensors would monitor physiological aspects of the
human—like their heart rate, the direction of their gaze, and
if their attention is focused—and the cognitive system might
realize that the car is better able to safely navigate a given
situation. The system would simultaneously keep close tabs
on the technical aspects of the car, looking out for obstacles
or errors that might be better navigated by a human. IBM
envisions it as a third intelligence, keeping watch over both
potential drivers.
One of the big challenges is being able to teach AI to
recognize the readiness of a human being. “If you’re in a
traffic jam, you kind of zone off, and are barely paying
attention—you from the outside look very similar to
someone who’s paying attention. What we are doing is
envisioning a self-driving vehicle that is able to assess the
readiness and risk associated with a human taking control of
the vehicle, given some anomaly on board
ARCHITECTURE
MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS IN
DRIVERLESS CARS
With the integration of sensor data processing in a
centralized electronic control unit (ECU) in a car, it is
imperative to increase the use of machine learning to
perform new tasks. Potential applications include driving
scenario classification or driver condition evaluation via
data fusion from different internal and external sensors-
such as cameras, radars, lidar or the Internet of Things.
While a pedestrian in a camera image is a perceptual
pattern, there are also patterns in decision making and
motion planning—the right behavior at a four way stop, or
when turning right on red, to name two examples—to which
deep learning can be applied. These are the kind of variable,
situation-dependent decisions that deep-learning algorithms
are better suited to making than the traditional, rules-based
approach with which they feel more comfortable. Though
deep learning’s “humanlike” pattern recognition leads to a
more nuanced behavior than you can expect from a rules-
based system, sometimes this can get you into trouble.
The Black Box
A deep-learning system’s ability to recognize patterns is a task of annotating the objects in every scene a self-driving
powerful tool, but because this pattern recognition occurs as car’s sensors capture must be completed. This data is what
part of algorithms running on neural networks, a major feeds deep-learning or rules-based algorithms.
concern is that the system is a “black box.” Once the system
In the autonomous car, one of the major tasks of a machine
is trained, data can be fed to it and a useful interpretation of
learning algorithm is continuous rendering of surrounding
those data will come out. But the actual decision-making
environment and forecasting the changes that are possible to
process that goes on between the input and output stages is
these surroundings. These tasks are classified into 4 sub-
not necessarily something that a human can intuitively
tasks:
understand. This is why many companies working on
vehicle autonomy are more comfortable with using • The detection of an Object
traditional robotics approaches for decision making, and • The Identification of an Object or recognition object
restrict deep learning to perception. They reason that if your classification
system makes an incorrect decision, you’d want to be able • The Object Localization and Prediction of Movement
to figure out exactly what happened and then make sure that
The machine learning algorithms are loosely divided into 4
the mistake won’t be repeated. There are a few tricks that
classes: decision matrix algorithms, cluster algorithms,
can be used to peek into the black box a little bit, and then
pattern recognition algorithms and regression algorithms.
validate what goes on inside of it. For example, you can
One category of the machine learning algorithms can be
feed very specific data in, like a camera image with almost
utilized to accomplish 2 or more subtasks. For instance, the
everything blacked out except the thing you want to query,
regression algorithms can be utilized for object localization
and then see how your algorithm reacts to slightly different
as well as object detection or prediction of the movement.
variations of that thing. Simulation can also be a very
helpful tool when dealing with specific situations that an
algorithm is having difficulty with.
Training the System
Deep-learning systems thrive on data. The more data an
algorithm sees, the better it’ll be able to recognize, and
generalize about, the patterns it needs to understand in order
to drive safely. For autonomous cars, which need to be able
to understand a vast array of different situations, the default
approach taken by most companies working on autonomous
driving is to just collect as much data as possible. The issue,
then, becomes managing the data and then doing something
useful with it. Drive.ai keeps in mind that data is not all
created equal. The company puts an immense
Decision Matrix Algorithms

amount of effort into collecting high quality data and then The decision matrix algorithm systematically analyzes,
annotating it so that it’s useful for training deep-learning identifies and rates the performance of relationships
algorithms. Before cars can drive themselves, the laborious between the sets of information and values. These
algorithms are majorly utilized for decision making.
Whether a car needs to brake or take a left turn is based on
the level of confidence these algorithms have on
recognition, classification and prediction of the next
movement of objects. The decision matrix algorithms are
models composed of various decision models trained
independently and in some way, these predictions are
combined to make the overall prediction, while decreasing
the possibility of errors in decision making. AdaBoosting is
the most commonly used algorithm.
AdaBoosting:
Adaptive Boosting or AdaBoost is a combination of
multiple learning algorithms that can be utilized for
regression or classification. It overcomes overfitting when
compared with any other machine learning algorithms and is
often sensitive to outliers and noisy data. In order to create
one composite powerful learner, AdaBoost uses multiple
iterations. So, it is termed as adaptive. By adding the weak
learners iteratively, AdaBoost creates a strong learner. A
new weak learner is appended to the entity and a weighing
vector is adjusted in order to pay attention on examples that
were classified incorrectly in the prior rounds. A classifier
that has much higher accuracy than the classifiers of weak
learners is the result.
AdaBoost helps in boosting the weak threshold classifier to
strong classifier. The above image depicts the
implementation of AdaBoost in one single file with
understandable code. The function contains a weak classifier
and the boosting component. The weak classifier attempts to
locate the ideal threshold in one of data dimensions to
segregate the data into 2 classes. The classifier is called by
the boosting part iteratively and after each classification
step, it changes the weights of misclassified examples.
Because of this, a cascade of weak classifiers is created and
it behaves like a strong classifier.
Clustering Algorithms
Sometimes, the images acquired by the system are not clear
and it becomes difficult to locate and detect objects.
Sometimes, there is a possibility of classification algorithms
missing the object and in that case, they fail to categorize
and report it to the system. The possible reason could be
discontinuous data, very few data points or low-resolution
images. The clustering algorithm is specialized in
discovering the structure from data points. It describes the
class of methods and class of problem like regression. The
clustering methods are organized typically by modeling the
approaches like hierarchical and centroid-based. All
methods are concerned with utilizing the inherent structures
in data to organize the data perfectly into groups of maximal
commonality. K-means, Multi-class Neural Network is the
most commonly used algorithm.
K-means
K-means is a famous clustering algorithm. K-means stores k
centroids that it utilizes for defining the clusters. A point is
said to be in a specific cluster if it is closer to the centroid of
that cluster than any other centroid. By alternating between
choosing the centroids depending on the current assignment
of data points to clusters and assigning the data points to
clusters depending on current centroids.
K-means Algorithm – The cluster centroids are depicted as
crosses and training examples are depicted as dots. (a)
Original dataset. (b) Random initial cluster centroids. (c-f)
The demonstration of running 2 iterations of k-means. Each
training example is assigned in each iteration to the cluster
centroid that is closest and then, each cluster centroid is
moved to mean of points assigned to it.
Pattern Recognition Algorithms (Classification)
The images obtained through sensors in Advanced Driver
Assistance Systems (ADAS) consists of all kinds of
environmental data; filtering of the images is needed to
determine the instances of an object category by ruling out
the data points that are irrelevant. Before classifying the
objects, the recognition of patterns is an important step in a
dataset. This kind of algorithms are defined as data
reduction algorithms.
The data reduction algorithms are helpful in reducing the
dataset edges and polylines (fitting line segments) of an
object as well as circular arcs to edges. Till a corner, the line
segments are aligned with the edges and a new line segment
will begin after this. The circular arcs align with the line
segments’ sequences that is similar to an arc. In various
ways, the features of the image (circular arcs and line
segments) are combined to form the features that are utilized
for determining an object.
With the PCA (Principle Component Analysis) and HOG
(Histograms of Oriented Gradients), the SVM (Support
Vector Machines) are the commonly used recognition
algorithms in ADAS. The K nearest neighbor (KNN) and
Bayes decision rule are also used.
Support Vector Machines(SVM)
SVM are dependent on the decision planes concept that
define the decision boundaries. The decision plane separates
the object set consisting of distinct class memberships. A
schematic example is illustrated below. In this, the objects
belong to either RED or GREEN class. A boundary line of
separation separates the RED and GREEN objects. Any new
object that falls to the left is labeled as RED and it is labeled
as GREEN if it falls to the left.
Regression Algorithms
This kind of algorithm is good at predicting events. The
Regression Analysis evaluates the relation between 2 or
more variables and collate the effects of variables on distinct
scales and are driven mostly by 3 metrics:
The shape of regression line.
The type of dependent variables.
The number of independent variables.
The images (camera or radar) play a significant role in
ADAS in actuation and localization, while for any
algorithm, the biggest challenge is to develop an image-
based model for feature selection and prediction.
The repeatability of the environment is leveraged by
regression algorithms to create a statistical model of relation
between the given object’s position in an image and that
image. The statistical model, by allowing the image
sampling, provides fast online detection and can be learned
offline. It can be extended furthermore to other objects
without the requirement of extensive human modeling. An
object’s position is returned by an algorithm as the online
stage’s output and a trust on the object’s presence.
The regression algorithms can also be utilized for short
prediction, long learning. This kind of regression algorithms
that can be utilized for self-driving cars are decision forest
regression, neural network regression and Bayesian
regression, among others.
Neural Network Regression
The neural networks are utilized for regression,
classification or unsupervised learning. They group the data
that is not labeled, classify that data or forecast continuous
values after supervised training. The neural networks
normally use a form of logistic regression in the final layer
of the net to change continuous data into variables like 1 or
0.
In the above figure, ‘x’ is the input, features passed forward Add to this the fact that we’re all getting older and living
from the previous layer of the network. Into every node of longer, and the urgent need to cut down carbon emissions,
last hidden layer, many x’s will be fed and every x will be and we’ve got a serious challenge on our hands. Technology
will no doubt play a huge role in addressing that
multiplied by w, a corresponding weight. To a bias, the
problem.Driverless cars- "the first large-scale deployment of
products’ sum is added and moved to an activation function. robotics in a society at large in human history”.
An activation function is a ReLU (rectified linear unit), used
commonly as it does not saturate on the shallow gradients
like the sigmoid activation functions do. ReLU provides an
output, activation a for each hidden node and the activations
are added going into output node which passes the sum of
activations. This implies, a neural network that performs
regression contains single output node and this node will
multiply the sum of activations of previous layer by 1. The
network’s estimate, ‘y hat’ will be the result. ‘Y hat’ is the
dependent variable that all the x’s map to. You can use the
neural network in this way to obtain the function relating
x(number of independent variables) to y (a dependent
variable) that you are trying to predict.
COMMERCIALS
COST ESTIMATION:
According to a recent study IHS Automotive forecasts that
the price for the self-driving technology will add between
$7,000 and $10,000 to a car's sticker price in 2025, a figure
that will drop to around $5,000 in 2030 and about $3,000 in
2035.
COMPANIES:
1.Tesla is aiming to have its driverless technology ready by
2018. ...
2.Uber's autonomous car is hitting the streets in Pittsburgh.
...
3.Google has never given a formal deadline, but has
suggested it's working on having the technology ready by
2020. ...
4.BMW will introduce its self-driving cars in China in 2021.
CONCLUSION
Most machine learning (ML) algorithms performance
plateaus at a certain point while DL algorithms easily scale
up to very large scales and hence can make good use of big
data. DL is probably the only ML algorithm that is able to
leverage the huge amounts of training data that comes from
autonomous car sensors such as the camera system. DL
systems are very powerful tools indeed but there are some
properties that may affect their practicality especially when
it comes to autonomous cars. The two major concerns I can
give are: Unpredictability and easy to fool. The problem of
moving people around efficiently is a bit of a ticking time
bomb, as the global population grows and concentrates in
already overcrowded urban centres.
REFERENCES:
[1] https://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/06/machine-learning-algorithms-used-self-driving-cars.html

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/how-driveai-is-mastering-autonomous-
driving-with-deep-learning
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/how-much-can-autonomous-cars-learn-from-virtual-
worlds
[4] http://visteon.bg/2017/03/02/machine-learning-algorithms-autonomous-cars/
[5] https://www.autoinsurancecenter.com/top-20-pros-and-cons-associated-with-self-driving-cars.htm