Spiking Autonomous Driving (SAD): End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Spiking Neural Networks

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Introduction

Spiking Autonomous Driving (SAD) is the first end-to-end autonomous driving system built entirely with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). It integrates perception, prediction, and planning modules into a unified neuromorphic framework.

Key Features

• End-to-end SNN architecture for autonomous driving, integrating perception, prediction, and planning
• Perception module constructs spatio-temporal Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation from multi-view cameras using SNNs
• Prediction module forecasts future states using a novel dual-pathway SNN
• Planning module generates safe trajectories considering occupancy prediction, traffic rules, and ride comfort

System Overview

Modules

Perception

The perception module constructs a spatio-temporal BEV representation from multi-camera inputs. The encoder uses sequence repetition, while the decoder employs sequence alignment.

Prediction

The prediction module utilizes a dual-pathway SNN, where one pathway encodes past information and the other predicts future distributions. The outputs from both pathways are fused.

Planning

The planning module optimizes trajectories using Spiking Gated Recurrent Units (SGRUs), taking into account static occupancy, future predictions, comfort, and other factors.

Get Started

Setup

conda env create -f environment.yml

Training

First, go to /sad/configs and modify the configs. Change the NAME in MODEL/ENCODER to the model we provided. The link is as follows: https://huggingface.co/ridger/MLP-SNN/blob/main/model.pth.tar

# Perception module pretraining
bash scripts/train_perceive.sh ${configs} ${dataroot}

# Prediction module pretraining 
bash scripts/train_prediction.sh ${configs} ${dataroot} ${pretrained}

# Entire model end-to-end training
bash scripts/train_plan.sh ${configs} ${dataroot} ${pretrained}

Citation

If you find SAD useful in your work, please cite the following source:

@article{zhu2024autonomous,
        title = {Autonomous Driving with Spiking Neural Networks},
        author = {Rui-Jie Zhu and Ziqing Wang and Leilani Gilpin and Jason K. Eshraghian},
        journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19687},
        year    = {2024}
}