Autonomous driving is a complex problem that can potentially be solved using artificial intelligence. The complexity stems from the system's need to understand the surroundings and make appropriate decisions. However, there are various challenges in constructing such a sophisticated system. One of the main challenges is to make the agent learn from the environmental input and since the environment is not fully observable and constantly changing, the agent should be flexible enough to extract important information from the input. To create such an agent this paper focused on the 3 different methods, specifically the application of frame stacking, long short-term memory (LSTM), and a combination of both methods. To analyze these methods 3 Deep Q Network(DQN) based agents are created. These 3 agents have frame stacking, LSTM, and both combined methods to solve the partially observable problem of autonomous driving. Their training performances are analyzed, and the results revealed significantly different trends in the training and evaluation phase.
Especially the experiment resulted in LSTM being a more robust method but had lower performance than DQN with frame stack, which showed a trade-off between these 2 qualities of an agent. The agent with LSTM and frame stack was able to learn faster at the beginning, but as it was unstable, it got a lower return value from the training run at the end. This instability can be a problem in the real world, especially in autonomous driving, where it is very important to have robust implementation.