Learned Path and Collision Prevention

Eric Av (Gonzaga University)
Hoang Huynh (Georgia State University-Perimeter College)
John Nguyen (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

Autonomous driving has captured academic and public imaginations for years. This project attempts to implicitly teach a car to follow the best optimized route to a destination while avoiding obstacles. The car is taught the optimized route based on a reward/penalty system via reinforcement learning. Using only the distance away from the nearest object and the angle of said object, the car avoids collisions and learns the optimized route in computer simulated worlds. Our goal is to demonstrate the utility of reinforcement learning models designed via simulation for training self-driving cars.