Simulating Autonomous Driving in Massive Mixed Urban Traffic

Abstract: Autonomous driving in an unregulated urban crowd is an outstanding challenge, especially, in the presence of many aggressive, high-speed traffic participants. This paper presents SUMMIT, a high-fidelity simulator that facilitates the development and testing of crowd-driving algorithms. SUMMIT simulates dense, unregulated urban traffic at any worldwide locations as supported by the OpenStreetMap. The core of SUMMIT is a multi-agent motion model, GAMMA, that models the behaviours of heterogeneous traffic agents, and a real-time POMDP planner, Context-POMDP, that serves as a driving expert. SUMMIT is built as an extension of CARLA and inherits from it the physical and visual realism for autonomous driving simulation. SUMMIT supports a wide range of applications, including perception, vehicle control or planning, and end-to-end learning. We validate the realism of our motion model using its traffic motion prediction accuracy on various real-world data sets. We also provide several real-world benchmark scenarios to show that SUMMIT simulates complex, realistic traffic behaviors, and Context-POMDP drives safely and efficiently in challenging crowd-driving settings.