A Comprehensive Survey on the Application of Deep and Reinforcement Learning Approaches in Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Recent advances in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have stimulated and paved the way toward the widespread introduction of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). This has opened new opportunities for smart roads, intelligent traffic safety, and traveler comfort. Autonomous Vehicles have become a highly popular research topic in recent years because of their significant capability to reduce road accidents and human injuries. This paper is an attempt to survey all recent AI based techniques used to deal with major functions in AVs, namely scene understanding, motion planning, decision making, vehicle control, social behavior, and communication. Our survey focuses solely on deep learning and reinforcement learning based approaches; it does not include conventional (shallow) shallow based techniques, a subject that has been extensively investigated in the past. Our survey builds a taxonomy of DL and RL algorithms that have been used so far to bring solutions to the four main issues in autonomous driving. Finally, this survey highlights the open challenges and points out possible future research directions.