Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving

1Shanghai AI Laboratory, 2Wuhan University, 3SenseTime Research
*Equal contribution Project lead

Abstract

Modern autonomous driving system is characterized as modular tasks in sequential order, i.e., perception, prediction, and planning. In order to perform a wide diversity of tasks and achieve advanced-level intelligence, contemporary approaches either deploy standalone models for individual tasks, or design a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. However, they might suffer from accumulative errors or deficient task coordination. Instead, we argue that a favorable framework should be devised and optimized in pursuit of the ultimate goal, i.e., planning of the self-driving car. Oriented at this, we revisit the key components within perception and prediction, and prioritize the tasks such that all these tasks contribute to planning. We introduce Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), a comprehensive framework up-to-date that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network. It is exquisitely devised to leverage advantages of each module, and provide complementary feature abstractions for agent interaction from a global perspective. Tasks are communicated with unified query interfaces to facilitate each other toward planning. We instantiate UniAD on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. With extensive ablations, the effectiveness of using such a philosophy is proven by substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-arts in all aspects. Code and models are public.



Sample Outputs


Paper and Supplementary Material


Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving
arXiv preprint, 2022.
(hosted on arXiv)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{uniad,
  title={Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving}, 
  author={Yihan Hu and Jiazhi Yang and Li Chen and Keyu Li and Chonghao Sima and Xizhou Zhu and Siqi Chai and Senyao Du and Tianwei Lin and Wenhai Wang and Lewei Lu and Xiaosong Jia and Qiang Liu and Jifeng Dai and Yu Qiao and Hongyang Li},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  year={2023},
  }
}