Anomaly Detection For Robust Autonomous Navigation

Human drivers are remarkably robust against various unexpected occurring variations and corruptions by understanding temporal changes and traffic scenes. In contrast, the neural network based autonomous navigation system can be easily affected by sensor data anomaly, like occlusion, sensor noise, challenging weather and illumination conditions. Such external disturbances are inevitable in practical driving applications. In this paper, we develop a semi-supervised anomaly detection module to detect the corrupted data while extracting the traffic scenario features. We further introduce an end-to-end robust autonomous navigation framework based on the idea that the consecutive frames of clean data depict a similar traffic scenario and the differences among the sequential data imply the dynamic state changes. By taking into consideration both spatial traffic scenario and temporal environmental variation, the model is able to achieve robust navigation against sensor data corruptions. We conduct experiments in CARLA platform and the evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.