Modular Neural Network for Learning Visual Features, Routes, and Operation Through Human Driving Data Toward Automatic Driving System

This paper proposes an automatic driving system based on a combination of modular neural networks processing human driving data. Research on automatic driving vehicles has been actively conducted in recent years. Machine learning techniques are often utilized to realize an automatic driving system capable of imitating human driving operations. Almost all of them adopt a large monolithic learning module, as typified by deep learning. However, it is inefficient to use a monolithic deep learning module to learn human driving operations (accelerating, braking, and steering) using the visual information obtained from a human driving a vehicle. We propose combining a series of modular neural networks that independently learn visual feature quantities, routes, and driving maneuvers from human driving data, thereby imitating human driving operations and efficiently learning a plurality of routes. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments using a small vehicle.