The sixth month of the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program teaches students about control. Control is how we actually turn the steering wheel or press the pedals to get the car to follow a trajectory, and the algorithms that perform this work are called “controllers”.
Two of the most common controllers for automotive applications are proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers and model predictive controllers (MPC). These are the two controllers we teach in the Udacity program.
Here are five different approaches Udacity students have taken to build controllers that drive the Udacity self-driving car around our simulator!
PID controller, self driving car
Andrey’s YouTube video simply mentions that his PID controller automatically learns hyperparameters. It looks like Andrey ran his car around the track multiple times and used some version of coordinate descent (the formal name for Sebastian’s Twiddle algorithm) to automatically tune the parameters.
“Implemented PID controller with automatically learned hyperparameters in C++ which allows the car learns to drive itself from scratch in the simulator.”
Autonomous Driving using Predictive Control Model
Anupriya talks about a number of the complications she encountered in developing her model predictive controller, and how she overcame them. Many of these are similar to what autonomous vehicle engineers find when deploying controllers to actual vehicles.
“This project also factors in real world latency that can occur while applying actuator inputs. To simulate this the project’s main thread sleeps for 100ms before sending the actuations to simulator. To account for this while returning the actuations to simulator I use 2 set of actuations — the real actuations for next step and the next predicted actuation after dt which is 0.1 second(100 ms) in my case. Sending the sum of these 2 actuations makes the model proactively apply the next actuation and hence handles the 100ms latency.”
Steering Control for self-driving car
Priya provides a thorough walkthrough of how she built her model predictive controller. If you’re interested in a line-by-line breakdown of how MPC works, this is a great read.
“To estimate the ideal steering angle and throttle, we estimate the error of our new state from our ideal state — actual trajectory we want to follow and the velocity and orientation we want to maintain and use a Ipopt Solver to minimize this error. This helps select the steering and throttle that minimizes the error with the desired trajectory.”
Self-Driving Car Engineer Diary — 10
Andrew compares and contrasts PID and MPC, along with a brief review of Term 2 of the Nanodegree Program. He does a nice job of summarizing the different levels of fidelity at which you can build a controller.
“PID controller enables the car (robot) to follow some trajectory (x-axis reference line) while proportionally (how hard to correct steering), differentially (how gradually to return to the reference) and integrally (allow for wheel misalignment) applying the cross track error (CTE). It is simple to code, inexpensive to run (computationally) and takes little tuning effort to get something working. The down-side is that the car moves erratically and cannot accurately handle actuation latency (delay between command send and physical activation) .”
Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree Project 10 — Model Predictive Control
I enjoy the musical selections Jeremy picks to underscore his project submissions, and this one is a lot of fun. The blog post also provides a nice perspective of what it’s like to complete the Udacity MPC project as a student.
“After some debugging and tuning the cost function, my car was making its way around the track. It was time to tear it all down by adding the latency — and that’s just what happened. My approach to dealing with it was twofold (not counting simply limiting the speed): the original kinematic equations depend upon the actuations from the previous time step, but with a delay of 100ms (which happened to be my time step interval) the actuations are applied another time step later, so I altered the equations to account for this.”
David Silver 