Learning to drive
Driving lessons in the European Union (EU) follow a structured plan that covers a diverse range of tasks, such as high-speed lane changes on the autobahn and parking. By design, these lessons capture the breadth of driving skills required to be mastered before the learner is deemed safe for public roads.
At the writing of the blog, the current generation of AVs (Autonomous Vehicles) fall well below the safety standards set for human drivers, but they both have a common goal. Executing driving tasks safely while generalizing to new locations.
AV development is accelerated by close loop testing in simulation as a proxy for generalizing to new environments. The scenarios in simulation do not test AVs for the local intricacies (inter/intra city) and variance in the real traffic behavior (time of day).
To bridge the gap between simulation and real world, Yaak is working with driving schools and building Open Scenario Map. An open-source scenario catalogue that enables AV developers to test in unseen, unbiased expert-curated scenarios.
To source diverse and critical scenarios, we partnered driving instructors who use Yaak's data collection platform to log the driving lessons they run. The driving lessons are enriched with incidents logged by driving instructors and driving task labels added from map data, f.ex unprotected right turn with bike lane.
Sample drive data: Scenario captured with eight cameras, GNSS and a 5G modem.
Dual policies
Instructor policies: Driving instructors operate the vehicle on the routes where they normally schedule their driving lessons, multiple times to cover seasonal and intra-day variations.
Student policies: During driving lessons student operate the vehicle and learn to execute driving tasks. The instructor present in the vehicle use an app to annotate driving incidents.
Incident: incorrect positioning within lane, visible in 2nd camera in the top row.
To log severe incidents, the driving instructor use the dual pedals to break or accelerate in the event the student's driving behavior is unsafe. 38,1% of the reported incidents are severe.
Severe Incident: Improper observance of yield sign causes the instructor to slam the brakes.
Scaling scenarios
Across 30 German cities driving instructor add our drive dataset (expert and student policies) every day. With a backlog of pre-orders we aim to to cover new cities and countries, to further capture unseen and unbiased scenarios, with the aim of of building the world's largest open-source repository of scenarios for developing a novel test of generalization for autonomy through Open Scenario Map.
