Towards learning-based planning:The nuPlan benchmark for real-world autonomous driving

Napat Karnchanachari; Dimitris Geromichalos; Kok Seang Tan; Nanxiang Li; Christopher Eriksen; Shakiba Yaghoubi; Noushin Mehdipour; Gianmarco Bernasconi; Whye Kit Fong; Yiluan Guo; Holger Caesar

arXiv · 2403.04133

Towards learning-based planning:The nuPlan benchmark for real-world autonomous driving

Napat Karnchanachari·Dimitris Geromichalos·Kok Seang Tan·Nanxiang Li·Christopher Eriksen·Shakiba Yaghoubi·Noushin Mehdipour·Gianmarco Bernasconi·Whye Kit Fong·Yiluan Guo·Holger Caesar

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Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) has replaced traditional handcrafted methods for perception and prediction in autonomous vehicles. Yet for the equally important planning task, the adoption of ML-based techniques is slow. We present nuPlan, the world's first real-world autonomous driving dataset, and benchmark. The benchmark is designed to test the ability of ML-based planners to handle diverse driving situations and to make safe and efficient decisions. To that end, we introduce a new large-scale dataset that consists of 1282 hours of diverse driving scenarios from 4 cities (Las Vegas, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Singapore) and includes high-quality auto-labeled object tracks and traffic light data. We exhaustively mine and taxonomize common and rare driving scenarios which are used during evaluation to get fine-grained insights into the performance and characteristics of a planner. Beyond the dataset, we provide a simulation and evaluation framework that enables a planner's actions to be simulated in closed-loop to account for interactions with other traffic participants. We present a detailed analysis of numerous baselines and investigate gaps between ML-based and traditional methods. Find the nuPlan dataset and code at nuplan.org.

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Napat Karnchanachari, Dimitris Geromichalos, Kok Seang Tan, Nanxiang Li, Christopher Eriksen, Shakiba Yaghoubi, Noushin Mehdipour, Gianmarco Bernasconi, Whye Kit Fong, Yiluan Guo, Holger Caesar. 2024-03-07. Towards learning-based planning:The nuPlan benchmark for real-world autonomous driving. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04133

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