Engineering Commons^™

Formal Language Constraints In Deep Reinforcement Learning For Self-Driving Vehicles, Tyler Bienhoff

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In recent years, self-driving vehicles have become a holy grail technology that, once fully developed, could radically change the daily behaviors of people and enhance safety. The complexities of controlling a car in a constantly changing environment are too immense to directly program how the vehicle should behave in each specific scenario. Thus, a common technique when developing autonomous vehicles is to use reinforcement learning, where vehicles can be trained in simulated and real-world environments to make proper decisions in a wide variety of scenarios. Reinforcement learning models, however, have uncertainties in how the vehicle acts, especially in a previously …