Talks

PhD Proposal: Towards Autonomous Driving in Dense, Heterogeneous, and Unstructured Traffic Environments

Rohan Chandra

4105 Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering (IRB)

Monday, November 29, 2021, 3:00-5:00 pm

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Abstract

The current success of autonomous driving is limited to highway and sparse urban traffic. This proposal lays out a blueprint for an autonomous driving stack for dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured surroundings. This includes developing new algorithms and systems to perceive, predict, and plan among human drivers in traffic typical of developing nations. There are several characteristics that elevate the difficulty of autonomous driving in such environments. For instance, there is a lack of clear lane markings, presence of non-standard objects e.g. animals, high heterogeneity, and high traffic density area. Furthermore, human drivers in such regions act unpredictably. This includes drivers weaving through traffic as opposed to lane driving as well as drivers breaking traffic rules such as running traffic lights, driving in the wrong lanes, and so on.

I will present my work on agent tracking (IROS’19, ICRA’20), trajectory prediction (CVPR’19, RAL/IROS’20), and driver behavior modeling (ICRA’20, IROS’20) in such traffic environments. I will then go over the ideas of behavior-driven planning and navigation in such traffic environments. Collectively, these disjoint ideas can be composed to design a new autonomous driving pipeline specifically intended for dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured traffic.

Examining Committee:

Chair:
Department Representative:
Members:

Dr. Dinesh Manocha
Dr. Yiannis Aloimonos
Dr. Pratap Tokekar
Dr.  Mac Schwager

Bio

Rohan Chandra is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the GAMMA Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park advised by Prof. Dinesh Manocha. He received a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland in 2018 and a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from the Delhi Technological University, Delhi in 2016. His research focuses on autonomous driving in dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured traffic environments. He has published his work in top computer vision and robotics conferences (CVPR, ICRA, IROS) and has interned at NVIDIA in the autonomous driving team. He is a Fellow in the Future Faculty program organized by The Clark School, UMD and has received the UMD summer research fellowship. He has given invited talks at academic seminars and workshops and has served on a robotics panel at RSS’21 alongside distinguished faculty. Outside of research, he enjoys teaching and mentoring younger students through diversity and inclusion initiatives like AI4ALL.

This talk is organized by Tom Hurst