Generative Model-based Simulation of Driver Behavior when Using Control Input Interface for Teleoperated Driving in Unstructured Canyon Terrains

Abstract

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in unstructured environments mostly operate through teleoperation. To enable stable teleoperated driving in unstructured environments, some research has suggested driver assistance and evaluation methods that involve user studies, which can be costly and require lots of time and effort. A simulation model-based approach has been proposed to complement the user study; however, the models on teleoperated driving do not account for unstructured environments. Our proposed solution involves simulation models of teleoperated driving for drivers that utilize a deep generative model. Initially, we build a teleoperated driving simulator to imitate unstructured environments based on previous research and collect driving data from drivers. Then, we design and implement the simulation models based on a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Our evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed teleoperated driving model can generate data by simulating the driver appropriately in unstructured canyon terrains.