End-To-End Imitation Learning of Lane Following Policies Using Sum-Product Networks

Abstract

Recent research has shown the potential of learning lane following policies from annotated video sequences through the use of advanced machine learning techniques. They however require high computational power, prohibiting their use in low-budget projects such as educational robotic kits and embedded devices. Sum-product networks (SPNs) are a class of deep probabilistic models with clear probabilistic semantics and competitive performance. Importantly, SPNs learned from data are usually several times smaller than deep neural networks trained for the same task. In this work, we develop an end-to-end imitation learning solution to lane following using SPNs to classify images into a finite set of actions. Images are obtained from a monocular camera, which is part of the low-cost custom made mobile robot. Our results show that our solution generalizes training conditions with relatively few data. We investigate the trade-off between computational and predictive performance, and conclude that sacrificing accuracy for the benefit of faster inference results in improved performance in the real world, especially in resource constrained environments.