aiqbench analysis
This paper uses reinforcement learning to train a drifting policy on a racing task, then transfers it to vehicle recovery from loss of control. The reported 186.8% recovery improvement is measured against a Stanley path tracker across 294 simulated initial states, and the ablation credits racing pretraining rather than broader state coverage. The 1:10-scale F1TENTH hardware results are a useful sim-to-real check, but readers should weigh the gains against the specific baselines and test conditions.
Race to Recovery: Designing Advanced Safety Systems for Autonomous Driving via Learning Autonomous Racing
arXiv:2610.20873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vehicles that lose control at the handling limit through icing, hydroplaning, or an abrupt evasive maneuver fall outside the operating envelope of production safety systems such as electronic stability control, which focus on preventing instability rather than recovering from it. Expert drivers regain authority in these conditions by drifting. Existing autonomous recovery approaches are validated on idealized scenarios, define "recovered" states empirically and inconsistently, or rely on offline-planned trajectories rather than acting online. We address these gaps by first training a racing policy with reinforcement learning that learns drifting as a time-optimal maneuver, then adapting it to recovery through continued training with a minimum-time reward. We define recovery relative to a phase-plane-grounded stable equilibrium and introduce Gym-Khana for controller training and evaluation. Across 294 initial loss-of-control states, the transferred policy improves recovery by 186.8% over a Stanley path tracker and outperforms both a nonlinear model predictive controller and a recovery-only policy trained from scratch, while also recovering faster on states the baseline can already handle. An ablation shows that racing pretraining, rather than broader initial-state exposure alone, drives this gain. Deployed on a physical 1:10-scale F1TENTH vehicle using system identification, actuator-lag modelling, and domain randomization, the transferred policy outperforms Stanley on every tested loss-of-control state, including recovering 50% of the time from a hard state the baseline never recovers from.
Abstract:Vehicles that lose control at the handling limit through icing, hydroplaning, or an abrupt evasive maneuver fall outside the operating envelope of production safety systems such as electronic stability control, which focus on preventing instability rather than recovering from it. Expert drivers regain authority in these conditions by drifting. Existing autonomous recovery approaches are validated on idealized scenarios, define "recovered" states empirically and inconsistently, or rely on offline-planned trajectories rather than acting online. We address these gaps by first training a racing policy with reinforcement learning that learns drifting as a time-optimal maneuver, then adapting it to recovery through continued training with a minimum-time reward. We define recovery relative to a phase-plane-grounded stable equilibrium and introduce Gym-Khana for controller training and evaluation. Across 294 initial loss-of-control states, the transferred policy improves recovery by 186.8% over a Stanley path tracker and outperforms both a nonlinear model predictive controller and a recovery-only policy trained from scratch, while also recovering faster on states the baseline can already handle. An ablation shows that racing pretraining, rather than broader initial-state exposure alone, drives this gain. Deployed on a physical 1:10-scale F1TENTH vehicle using system identification, actuator-lag modelling, and domain randomization, the transferred policy outperforms Stanley on every tested loss-of-control state, including recovering 50% of the time from a hard state the baseline never recovers from.
13 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2610.20873 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.20873v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.20873 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 326 words
