Considering that human-driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will coexist on roads in the future for a long time, how to merge AVs into human drivers traffic ecology and minimize the effect of AVs and their misfit with human drivers, are issues worthy of consideration. Moreover, different passengers have different needs for AVs, thus, how to provide personalized choices for different passengers is another issue for AVs. Therefore, a human-like decision making framework is designed for AVs in this paper. Different driving styles and social interaction characteristics are formulated for AVs regarding driving safety, ride comfort and travel efficiency, which are considered in the modeling process of decision making. Then, Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg game theory are applied to the noncooperative decision making. In addition, potential field method and model predictive control (MPC) are combined to deal with the motion prediction and planning for AVs, which provides predicted motion information for the decision-making module. Finally, two typical testing scenarios of lane change, i.e., merging and overtaking, are carried out to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed decision-making framework considering different human-like behaviors. Testing results indicate that both the two game theoretic approaches can provide reasonable human-like decision making for AVs. Compared with the Nash equilibrium approach, under the normal driving style, the cost value of decision making using the Stackelberg game theoretic approach is reduced by over 20%.
The ability to estimate human intentions and interact with human drivers intelligently is crucial for autonomous vehicles to successfully achieve their objectives. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic planning algorithm that models human opponents with an iterative reasoning framework and estimates human latent cognitive states through probabilistic inference and active learning. By modeling the interaction as a partially observable Markov decision process with adaptive state and action spaces, our algorithm is able to accomplish real-time lane changing tasks in a realistic driving simul…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Planning under social interactions with other agents is an essential problem for autonomous driving. As the actions of the autonomous vehicle in the interactions affect and are also affected by other agents, autonomous vehicles need to efficiently infer the reaction of the other agents. Most existing approaches formulate the problem as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem solved by optimization-based methods. However, they demand too much computational resource and easily fall into the local minimum due to the non-convexity. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) successfully tackles such issues in …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
We present a novel approach for risk-aware planning with human agents in multi-agent traffic scenarios. Our approach takes into account the wide range of human driver behaviors on the road, from aggressive maneuvers like speeding and overtaking, to conservative traits like driving slowly and conforming to the right-most lane. In our approach, we learn a mapping from a data-driven human driver behavior model called the CMetric to a driver's entropic risk preference. We then use the derived risk preference within a game-theoretic risk-sensitive planner to model risk-aware interactions among huma…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Autonomous driving has gained significant advancements in recent years. However, obtaining a robust control policy for driving remains challenging as it requires training data from a variety of scenarios, including rare situations (e.g., accidents), an effective policy architecture, and an efficient learning mechanism. We propose ADAPS for producing robust control policies for autonomous vehicles. ADAPS consists of two simulation platforms in generating and analyzing accidents to automatically produce labeled training data, and a memory-enabled hierarchical control policy. Additionally, ADAPS …
UniSTPA: A Safety Analysis Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
National Key Laboratory of Automotive Chassis Integration and Bionics, Jilin University, Changchun, China（吉林大学汽车底盘集成与仿生国家级重点实验室）；School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot‐Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom（赫瑞-沃森大学工程与物理科学学院）
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Robots operating in multi-player settings must simultaneously model the environment and the behavior of human or robotic agents who share that environment. This modeling is often approached using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM); however, SLAM algorithms usually neglect multi-player interactions. In contrast, the motion planning literature often uses dynamic game theory to explicitly model noncooperative interactions of multiple agents in a known environment with perfect localization. Here, we present GTP-SLAM, a novel, iterative best response-based SLAM algorithm that accurately p…
World Models for Autonomous Driving: An Initial Survey
University of Macau（澳门大学）；College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学交通运输工程学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；University of Hawaii at Manoa（夏威夷大学马诺阿分校）
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The actions of an autonomous vehicle on the road affect and are affected by those of other drivers, whether overtaking, negotiating a merge, or avoiding an accident. This mutual dependence, best captured by dynamic game theory, creates a strong coupling between the vehicle's planning and its predictions of other drivers' behavior, and constitutes an open problem with direct implications on the safety and viability of autonomous driving technology. Unfortunately, dynamic games are too computationally demanding to meet the real-time constraints of autonomous driving in its continuous state and a…
Highly automated, cooperative driving vehicles will allow for a more fluid flow of traffic, resulting in more efficient, eco-friendly and safe traffic situations. The automotive industry however, is safety critical and current safety standards were not designed to deal with cooperative driving. In this paper, we apply a modern safety analysis method, Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis, in the context of cooperative driving as part of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) and present our reflections on the method.
Autonomous vehicles interacting with other traffic participants heavily rely on the perception and prediction of other agents' behaviors to plan safe trajectories. However, as occlusions limit the vehicle's perception ability, reasoning about potential hazards beyond the field of view is one of the most challenging issues in developing autonomous driving systems. This paper introduces a novel analytical approach that poses safe trajectory planning under occlusions as a hybrid zero-sum dynamic game between the autonomous vehicle (evader) and an initially hidden traffic participant (pursuer). Du…
We present an information theoretic approach to stochastic optimal control problems that can be used to derive general sampling based optimization schemes. This new mathematical method is used to develop a sampling based model predictive control algorithm. We apply this information theoretic model predictive control (IT-MPC) scheme to the task of aggressive autonomous driving around a dirt test track, and compare its performance to a model predictive control version of the cross-entropy method.
Safe navigation in dense, urban driving environments remains an open problem and an active area of research. Unlike typical predict-then-plan approaches, game-theoretic planning considers how one vehicle's plan will affect the actions of another. Recent work has demonstrated significant improvements in the time required to find local Nash equilibria in general-sum games with nonlinear objectives and constraints. When applied trivially to driving, these works assume all vehicles in a scene play a game together, which can result in intractable computation times for dense traffic. We formulate a …
