Comparison of Control Methods Based on Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving

Recently, some learning-based methods such as reinforcement learning and imitation learning have been used to address the control problem for autonomous driving. Note that reinforcement learning has strong reliance on the simulation environment and requires a handcraft design of the reward function. Considering different factors in autonomous driving, a general evaluation method is still being explored. The purpose of imitation learning is to learn the control policy through human demonstrations. It is meaningful to compare the control performances of current main imitation learning methods based on the provided dataset. In this paper, we compare three typical imitation learning algorithms: Behavior cloning, Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) and Information maximizing Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (InfoGAIL) in the The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) and Car Learning to Act (CARLA) simulators, respectively. The performance of algorithms is evaluated on lane-keeping task in racing and urban environment. The experiment results show DAgger performs best in simple lane keeping problem, and InfoGAIL has the unique advantage of distinguishing different driving styles from expert demonstrations.