Simulated Autonomous Driving Using Reinforcement Learning: A Comparative Study on Unity’s ML-Agents Framework

Advancements in artificial intelligence are leading researchers to find use cases that were not as straightforward to solve in the past. The use case of simulated autonomous driving has been known as a notoriously difficult task to automate, but advancements in the field of reinforcement learning have made it possible to reach satisfactory results. In this paper, we explore the use of the Unity ML-Agents toolkit to train intelligent agents to navigate a racing track in a simulated environment using RL algorithms. The paper compares the performance of several different RL algorithms and configurations on the task of training kart agents to successfully traverse a racing track and identifies the most effective approach for training kart agents to navigate a racing track and avoid obstacles in that track. The best results, value loss of 0.0013 and a cumulative reward of 0.761, were yielded using the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm. After successfully choosing a model and algorithm that can traverse the track with ease, different objects were added to the track and another model (which used behavioral cloning as a pre-training option) was trained to avoid such obstacles. The aforementioned model resulted in a value loss of 0.001 and a cumulative reward of 0.068, proving that behavioral cloning can help achieve satisfactory results where the in game agents are able to avoid obstacles more efficiently and complete the track with human-like performance, allowing for a deployment of intelligent agents in racing simulators.