The paper introduces a low‑cost, open experimental platform for end‑to‑end autonomous driving on miniature Ackermann vehicles, combining a physical car, printed track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin. It implements command‑conditioned behavior cloning, achieving a mean cross‑track error of 6.1 cm on the real vehicle and demonstrating the impact of camera field of view in simulation. Using synthetic data from the digital twin and a sim‑to‑real image translator, a higher‑capacity policy trained on both synthetic and real data completes all four track routes, outperforming the baseline trained only on real data.
By Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George Zipperer
The paper introduces a low‑cost, open experimental platform for end‑to‑end autonomous driving on miniature Ackermann vehicles. It combines a physical vehicle, a printed urban track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin to link simulation and real‑world experiments. Using command‑conditioned behavior cloning, the authors demonstrate that a neural policy can follow lanes with a mean cross‑track error of 6.1 cm, and that synthetic data plus a sim‑to‑real image translator improves performance on all track routes.
OPTED is a method for on‑policy fine‑tuning of end‑to‑end driving models that separates reinforcement learning from the policy update. A privileged teacher trained with RL on vectorized inputs (HD‑maps and bounding boxes) supervises the pre‑trained student during closed‑loop post‑training. Applied to the camera‑based models TransFuser and VaVAM in AlpaSim, OPTED boosts driving scores by 1.6× and 9.5×, respectively, while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude fewer simulator interactions than direct RL post‑training.
By Damiano Da Col, Maximilian Igl, Peter Karkus, Kashyap Chitta, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Konrad Schindler, Christos Sakaridis
End-to-end models that map multimodal inputs directly to future trajectories/maneuvers have emerged as an increasingly prominent research paradigm in autonomous driving. This class of models includes both Vision-Language-Action models and trajectory-generative planners.
arXiv:2606. 17386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments.
By Zikang Xiong, Weixin Li, Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Saarth Bonde, Grantland Hall, Chen Tang, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan
MILER is an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning framework that achieves zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. It uses a custom semantic mid‑level representation (MLR) simulator for offline training, and during deployment it processes real camera and LiDAR data with BEVFusion to produce a compatible bird’s‑eye‑view representation. The policy’s actions are applied via a trajectory‑alignment strategy, allowing the system to drive 17.3 km on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, all running on a Jetson AGX Orin.
By Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko Maehlisch
arXiv:2510. 12560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse.
By Xiaoji Zheng, Ziyuan Yang, Yanhao Chen, Yuhang Peng, Yuanrong Tang, Gengyuan Liu, Bokui Chen, Jiangtao Gong
arXiv:2604. 03497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-model (VLM)-guided reinforcement learning (RL) has recently attracted significant attention for it, replacing brittle hand-crafted rewards with semantically grounded signals; however, deploying such simulation-trained policies on real vehicles remains a fundamental challenge, because they rely on simulator-native observations and simulator-coupled action semantics with no counterpart on physical hardware.
By Zilin Huang, Zhengyang Wan, Zihao Sheng, Boyue Wang, Junwei You, Sikai Chen
arXiv:2607. 13028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training robust autonomous driving agents requires a simulator that is fast enough for reinforcement learning at scale, realistic enough to ground behavior in real-world map structure, and diverse enough to cover the safety-critical long tail that logged data rarely contains.
By Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Wei-Jer Chang, Zachary Lee, Tim Wang, Wei Zhan
arXiv:2606. 09758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parametric imitation learning via behavior cloning can suffer from poor generalization to out-of-distribution states due to compounding errors during deployment.
By Quinn Pfeifer, Ethan Pronovost, Paarth Shah, Khimya Khetarpal, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv:2603. 05995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Off-road autonomous driving poses significant challenges such as navigating unmapped, variable terrain with uncertain and diverse dynamics.
By Zhouchonghao Wu, Raymond Song, Vedant Mundheda, Luis E. Navarro-Serment, Christof Schoenborn, Jeff Schneider
arXiv:2606. 18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time.
By Mingtong Zhang, Dhruv Shah