Simulated Autonomous Driving in a Realistic Driving Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning and a Deterministic Finite State Machine

In the field of autonomous driving, the system controlling the vehicle can be seen as an agent acting in a complex environment and thus naturally fits into the modern framework of reinforcement learning. However, learning to drive can be a challenging task and current results are often restricted to simplified driving environments. To advance the field, we present a method to adaptively restrict the action space of the agent according to its current driving situation and show that it can be used to swiftly learn to drive in a realistic environment based on the deep Q-learning algorithm.