Drive in Corridors: Enhancing the Safety of End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Corridor Learning and Planning

Abstract

Safety remains one of the most critical challenges in autonomous driving systems. In recent years, the end-to-end driving has shown great promise in advancing vehicle autonomy in a scalable manner. However, existing approaches often face safety risks due to the lack of explicit behavior constraints. To address this issue, we uncover a new paradigm by introducing the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">corridor</i> as the intermediate representation. Widely adopted in robotics planning, the corridors represents spatio-temporal obstacle-free zones for the vehicle to traverse. To ensure accurate corridor prediction in diverse traffic scenarios, we develop a comprehensive learning pipeline including data annotation, architecture refinement and loss formulation. The predicted corridor is further integrated as the constraint in a trajectory optimization process. By extending the differentiability of the optimization, we enable the optimized trajectory to be seamlessly trained within the end-to-end learning framework, improving both safety and interpretability. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our approach, showing a 66.7% reduction in collisions with agents and a 46.5% reduction with curbs, significantly enhancing the safety of end-to-end driving. Additionally, incorporating the corridor contributes to higher success rates in closed-loop evaluations. Project page: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://zhiwei-pg.github.io/Drive-in-Corridors</uri>.