Cited by 2,342Reinforcement Learning in RoboticsAutonomous Vehicle Technology and SafetyTraffic and Road Safety

Deep reinforcement learning for autonomous driving: A survey

Open access
Kiran, B Ravi, Sobh, Ibrahim, Talpaert, Victor, Mannion, Patrick, Sallab, Ahmad A. Al, Yogamani, Senthil, Perez, Patrick·2022·IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract

With the development of deep representation learning, the domain of reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful learning framework now capable of learning complex policies in high dimensional environments. This review summarises deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and provides a taxonomy of automated driving tasks where (D)RL methods have been employed, while addressing key computational challenges in real world deployment of autonomous driving agents. It also delineates adjacent domains such as behavior cloning, imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning that are related but are not classical RL algorithms. The role of simulators in training agents, methods to validate, test and robustify existing solutions in RL are discussed.

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  • Most RL-based driving studies have focused on safety constraints or reward shaping, without explicitly operationalizing ethical reasoning across multiple road users.

    “Still, most RL-based driving studies have focused on safety constraints or reward shaping, without explicitly operationalizing ethical reasoning across multiple road users.”

    From Ethics-Aware Safe Reinforcement Learning for Rare-Event Risk Control in Interactive Urban Driving (2026) · cites this paper as [12]

    The survey’s sections on intrinsic rewards and incorporating safety in DRL discuss reward shaping and safety-focused approaches; the former calls reward shaping the most common solution to reward design. But the survey does not establish that most RL-based driving studies focus on those approaches, or explicitly assess whether they operationalize ethical reasoning across multiple road users. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Robots still struggle to solve high-level tasks such as locomotion, autonomous driving and dexterous manipulation, even though low-level controllers and motion planning algorithms are robust enough to drive joints and end-effectors to desired configurations.

    “Even though low-level controllers and motion planning algorithms are robust enough to drive the joints and end-effectors to reach their desired configuration, robots still struggle to solve high-level tasks, such as locomotion [3], autonomous driving [4] and dexterous manipulation [5].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 19

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Authors
Kiran, B. R., Sobh, I., Talpaert, V., Mannion, P., Sallab, A. A. A., Yogamani, S., & Perez, P.
Affiliations
  • Navya, Courbevoie, France
  • Valeo Cairo AI Team, Giza, Egypt
  • École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (FR)
  • Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway (IE)
  • Valeo (Ireland) (IE)
  • Valeo.ai, Paris, France
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Published
2022-06
Volume
23
Issue
6
Pages
4909-4926
ISSN
  • 1524-9050 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-0016
OpenAlex
W3003533476
Cited by
2,342
References
146
Citations by year
2026: 354 · 2025: 573 · 2024: 542 · 2023: 435 · 2022: 258 · 2021: 157 · 2020: 23
FWCI
122.51
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality › Traffic and Road Safety
Keywords
deep reinforcement learning, autonomous driving, reinforcement learning algorithms, behavior cloning, imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning, driving simulator, autonomous driving validation, robustness, field deployment

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