RPRP-SAP: A Robust and Precise ResNet Predictor for Steering Angle Prediction of Autonomous Vehicles

Steering angle controller is a core module of autonomous vehicles, where a slight miscalculation can cause severe accidents. Following safety precautions, development of robust and precise steering angle predictor is an active area of research. However, existing simulator based steering angle predictors lack in predictive performance and have not been evaluated on same benchmark datasets. Furthermore, most of them are evaluated on simulated datasets and their potential on real-world data as well as in cross-domain evaluation of both types data (real-world, simulated) remain unexplored. To accelerate and expedite research related to steering angle prediction contributions of this paper are manifold: 1) It presents two benchmark datasets that are developed using Udacity and CARLA simulators. 2) Following the need for comparative study, over both simulated datasets, it benchmarks the performance of existing predictors under 2 different evaluation settings namely: same-track and cross-track evaluation. 3) In cross-domain evaluation, it explores generalization potential of predictors by training predictors on simulated data and evaluating them on 2 real-world datasets and vice versa. 4) It presents a robust and precise steering angle predictor that utilizes skip connections for proper gradient flow among different convolutional layers. In same-track evaluation where predictors are trained and evaluated on same-track data, proposed predictor outperforms existing predictors by achieving least Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.13, 0.19 and 0.065 over lake track, jungle track and CARLA based datasets, respectively. Similarly, in cross-track evaluation where predictors are trained on one track and are evaluated on other track data, once again proposed predictor outperforms existing predictors by producing average least MAE errors of 0.33 and 0.06 over Udacity and CARLA datasets, respectively. Over two real-world datasets, Sully Chen and Comma.ai, the proposed predictor demonstrates superior performance compared to existing simulator-based predictors, achieving the lowest MAE of 2.41 and 0.50, respectively.