Autonomous Braking and Throttle System: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Naturalistic Driving

Abstract: Autonomous Braking and Throttle control is key in developing safe driving systems for the future. There exists a need for autonomous vehicles to negotiate a multi-agent environment while ensuring safety and comfort. A Deep Reinforcement Learning based autonomous throttle and braking system is presented. For each time step, the proposed system makes a decision to apply the brake or throttle. The throttle and brake are modelled as continuous action space values. We demonstrate 2 scenarios where there is a need for a sophisticated braking and throttle system, i.e when there is a static obstacle in front of our agent like a car, stop sign. The second scenario consists of 2 vehicles approaching an intersection. The policies for brake and throttle control are learned through computer simulation using Deep deterministic policy gradients. The experiment shows that the system not only avoids a collision, but also it ensures that there is smooth change in the values of throttle/brake as it gets out of the emergency situation and abides by the speed regulations, i.e the system resembles human driving.