A Framework for Vehicle Motion Planning Research

Paper | Supplementary | Poster | Videos

Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning
Daniel Dauner^1,2, Marcel Hallgarten^1,3, Andreas Geiger^1,2, and Kashyap Chitta^1,2
1 University of Tübingen, ² Tübingen AI Center, ³ Robert Bosch GmbH

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023
Winner, 2023 nuPlan Challenge

This repo is intended to serve as a starting point for vehicle motion planning research on nuPlan. We provide a publicly accessible configuration for validation, comprehensive set of baselines, and pre-trained planning models.

teaser.mp4

News

• 30 Aug, 2023: Our paper was accepted at CoRL 2023!
• 20 Aug, 2023: We renamed our repository to "tuPlan Garage" due to trademark conflicts.
• 01 Aug, 2023: We released the code for GC-PGP!
• 26 Jun, 2023: We released our supplementary material and the code for PDM-Closed.
• 14 Jun, 2023: We released our paper on arXiv.
• 2 Jun, 2023: Our approach won the 2023 nuPlan Challenge!

Overview

• The release of nuPlan marks a new era in vehicle motion planning research, offering the first large-scale real-world dataset and evaluation schemes requiring both precise short-term planning and long-horizon ego-forecasting. Existing systems struggle to simultaneously meet both requirements.

• Indeed, we find that these tasks are fundamentally misaligned and should be addressed independently.

• We further assess the current state of closed-loop planning in the field, revealing the limitations of learning-based methods in complex real-world scenarios and the value of simple rule-based priors such as centerline selection through lane graph search algorithms.

• More surprisingly, for the open-loop sub-task, we observe that the best results are achieved when using only this centerline as scene context (i.e., ignoring all information regarding the map and other agents).

• Combining these insights, we propose an extremely simple and efficient planner which outperforms an extensive set of competitors, winning the nuPlan planning challenge 2023.

Videos

Here are four videos for talks and visualizations of our method:

• 📺 Spotlight (1min) - Presentation of our CoRL poster.

• 📺 Supplementary Video (3min) - Comparison of simulation modes and methods in nuPlan.

• 📺 Talk CVPR'23 E2EAD (5min) - Competition presentation. (Slides)

• 📺 Talk CVPR'23 WAD (18min) - Keynote about Misconceptions in Autonomous Driving. (Slides)

Contributing

If you consider contributing to tuPlan Garage, make sure to check out our Contribution Guidelines

Method

We decompose the process of determining a safe and comfortable trajectory into two sub-tasks: (1) planning the short-term motion, and (2) accurately forecasting the long-term ego trajectory. While the former primarily impacts closed-loop performance, the latter is essential for the open-loop task. Our method employs a rule-based predictive planner to generate a trajectory proposal, and a learned ego-forecasting module that refines the trajectory with a particular emphasis on long-term forecasting.

Results

Planning results on the proposed Val14 benchmark. Please refer to the paper for more details.

Method	Representation	CLS-R ↑	CLS-NR ↑	OLS ↑	Time (ms) ↓
Urban Driver*	Polygon	50	53	82	64
GC-PGP	Graph	55	59	83	100
PlanCNN	Raster	72	73	64	43
IDM	Centerline	77	76	38	27
PDM-Open	Centerline	54	50	86	7
PDM-Closed	Centerline	92	93	42	91
PDM-Hybrid	Centerline	92	93	84	96
Log Replay	GT	80	94	100	-

*Open-loop reimplementation of Urban Driver

To Do

• Additional baselines
• Visualization scripts
• Contribution guide
• ML planners code & checkpoints
• Supplementary material, video, slides
• Val14 benchmark
• Installation tutorial
• PDM-Closed release
• Initial repo & main paper

Getting started

1. Installation

To install tuPlan Garage, please follow these steps:

• setup the nuPlan dataset (described here) and install the nuPlan devkit (see here)
• download tuPlan Garage and move inside the folder

git clone https://github.com/autonomousvision/tuplan_garage.git && cd tuplan_garage

• make sure the environment you created when installing the nuplan-devkit is activated

conda activate nuplan

• install the local tuplan_garage as a pip package

pip install -e .

• add the following environment variable to your ~/.bashrc

NUPLAN_DEVKIT_ROOT="$HOME/nuplan-devkit/"

2. Training

When running a training, you have to add the hydra.searchpath for the tuplan_garage correctly. Note: since hydra does not yet support appending to lists (see here), you have to add the original searchpaths in the override. Training scripts can be run with the scripts found in /scripts/training/. Before training from an already existing cache, please check this issue. You can find our trained models here.

3. Evaluation

Same as for the training, when running an evaluation, you have to add the hydra.searchpath for the tuplan_garage correctly. The example below runs an evaluation of the pdm_closed_planner on the val14_split, both of which are part of the tuplan_garage

python $NUPLAN_DEVKIT_ROOT/nuplan/planning/script/run_simulation.py \
+simulation=closed_loop_nonreactive_agents \
planner=pdm_closed_planner \
scenario_filter=val14_split \
scenario_builder=nuplan \
hydra.searchpath="[pkg://tuplan_garage.planning.script.config.common, pkg://tuplan_garage.planning.script.config.simulation, pkg://nuplan.planning.script.config.common, pkg://nuplan.planning.script.experiments]"

You can find exemplary shells scripts in /scripts/simulation/

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to open an issue or contact us (daniel.dauner@uni-tuebingen.de).

Citation

If you find tuPlan Garage useful, please consider giving us a star 🌟 and citing our paper with the following BibTeX entry.

@InProceedings{Dauner2023CORL,
  title={Parting with Misconceptions about Learning-based Vehicle Motion Planning},
  author={Dauner, Daniel and Hallgarten, Marcel and Geiger, Andreas and Chitta, Kashyap},
  booktitle={Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},
  year={2023}
}

Disclaimer

tuPlan Garage includes code from Motional's nuplan-devkit. We are not affiliated with Motional, and the repository is not published, maintained or otherwise related to Motional.

Other resources

• NAVSIM | SLEDGE | CARLA garage | Survey on E2EAD
• PlanT | KING | TransFuser | NEAT

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