# A Low-Cost, Open Platform for End-to-End Autonomous Driving on a Miniature Ackermann Vehicle

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04147/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation-learning end-to-end planners, one of 9 directions in End-to-end autonomous driving.
- Builds on 13 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- End-to-end autonomous driving / [Imitation-learning end-to-end planners](https://mlsanity.com/driving/imitation-learning-end-to-end-planners/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [Learning by Cheating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12294/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08980/) (2019)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [A Survey of Motion Planning and Control Techniques for Self-driving Urban Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07446/) (2016)
- [Robot Operating System 2: Design, Architecture, and Uses In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07752/) (2022)
- [DeepPicar: A Low-cost Deep Neural Network-based Autonomous Car](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.08644/) (2017)
- [A Fleet of Miniature Cars for Experiments in Cooperative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06133/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a low-cost, open experimental platform for research in end-to-end autonomous driving with miniature Ackermann vehicles. The platform combines a physical vehicle, a printed urban track, data collection tools, trajectory registration, and a Webots digital twin, enabling controlled experiments that connect simulation-based autonomous-driving methods to real-world execution. As a first baseline, we implement command-conditioned behavior cloning, in which a neural policy receives an on-board camera image and a high-level navigation command and outputs steering and speed. The system is evaluated both on the physical vehicle and in simulation. In real closed-loop experiments, the learned policy follows lanes and executes commanded turns, reaching a mean cross-track error of 6.1 cm with respect to the reference route, close to the 4.7 cm observed in human demonstrations. In the digital twin, camera field of view has a strong effect on performance, reducing the mean cross-track error from 35.6 to 3.3 cm when widened from 58 to 120 degrees. Using the digital twin to generate synthetic driving data and a learned sim-to-real image translator to reduce the appearance gap, we further show that a higher-capacity policy trained on this synthetic data combined with real demonstrations is the only configuration that completes all four track routes in closed loop, whereas the compact baseline and the same network trained on real data alone complete fewer. These results establish the open platform as a practical testbed for sim-to-real studies and provide an initial command-conditioned imitation-learning baseline; we release it to support reproducible research.