Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes

Modern autonomous driving systems are typically divided into three main tasks: perception, prediction, and planning. The planning task involves predicting the trajectory of the ego vehicle based on inputs from both internal intention and the external environment, and manipulating the vehicle accordingly. Most existing works evaluate their performance on the nuScenes dataset using the L2 error and collision rate between the predicted trajectories and the ground truth. In this paper, we reevaluate these existing evaluation metrics and explore whether they accurately measure the superiority of different methods. Specifically, we design an MLP-based method that takes raw sensor data (e.g., past trajectory, velocity, etc.) as input and directly outputs the future trajectory of the ego vehicle, without using any perception or prediction information such as camera images or LiDAR. Our simple method achieves similar end-to-end planning performance on the nuScenes dataset with other perception-based methods, reducing the average L2 error by about 20%. Meanwhile, the perception-based methods have an advantage in terms of collision rate. We further conduct in-depth analysis and provide new insights into the factors that are critical for the success of the planning task on nuScenes dataset. Our observation also indicates that we need to rethink the current open-loop evaluation scheme of end-to-end autonomous driving in nuScenes. Codes are available at https://github.com/E2E-AD/AD-MLP.