ReinVBC: A Model-based Reinforcement Learning Approach to Vehicle Braking Controller

Abstract

Braking system, the key module to ensure the safety and steer-ability of current vehicles, relies on extensive manual calibration during production. Reducing labor and time consumption while maintaining the Vehicle Braking Controller (VBC) performance greatly benefits the vehicle industry. Model-based methods in offline reinforcement learning, which facilitate policy exploration within a data-driven dynamics model, offer a promising solution for addressing real-world control tasks. This work proposes ReinVBC, which applies an offline model-based reinforcement learning approach to deal with the vehicle braking control problem. We introduce useful engineering designs into the paradigm of model learning and utilization to obtain a reliable vehicle dynamics model and a capable braking policy. Several results demonstrate the capability of our method in real-world vehicle braking and its potential to replace the production-grade anti-lock braking system.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: Illustration of ReinVBC: vehicle braking controller by offline model-based reinforcement learning
• Figure 2: Comparison between the model roll-out (in orange) and the real-world sequence (in blue).
• Figure 3: Learning curves of SAC in the learned vehicle dynamics model. The solid lines indicate the mean while the shaded areas indicate the standard error over five different seeds.
• Figure 4: In-distribution test results in real-world (with 40km/h as braking speed), in terms of braking distance (in meter) and braking deviation (in degree). The height of the bars represents the mean, and the error bars indicate the standard deviation, over five experiments. Due to the significant differences in values for braking deviation across different methods, the y-axis of the corresponding chart uses a logarithmic scale.
• Figure 5: Speed curves during braking on the split-friction straight in the hardware-in-loop simulation. We separately compare the vehicle speed sequence with each wheel’s speed sequence. The solid lines indicate the wheel speed curves of each wheel, while the dashed line indicates the vehicle speed for reference.