Driving in a human-like manner is important for an autonomous vehicle to be a smart and predictable traffic participant. To achieve this goal, parameters of the motion planning module should be carefully tuned, which needs great effort and expert knowledge. In this study, a method of learning cost parameters of a motion planner from naturalistic driving data is proposed. The learning is achieved by encouraging the selected trajectory to approximate the human driving trajectory under the same traffic situation. The employed motion planner follows a widely accepted methodology that first samples candidate trajectories in the trajectory space, then select the one with minimal cost as the planned trajectory. Moreover, in addition to traditional factors such as comfort, efficiency and safety, the cost function is proposed to incorporate incentive of behavior decision like a human driver, so that both lane change decision and motion planning are coupled into one framework. Two types of lane incentive cost -- heuristic and learning based -- are proposed and implemented. To verify the validity of the proposed method, a data set is developed by using the naturalistic trajectory data of human drivers collected on the motorways in Beijing, containing samples of lane changes to the left and right lanes, and car followings. Experiments are conducted with respect to both lane change decision and motion planning, and promising results are achieved.
IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
Standard Model Predictive Control (MPC) or trajectory optimization approaches perform only a local search to solve a complex non-convex optimization problem. As a result, they cannot capture the multi-modal characteristic of human driving. A global optimizer can be a potential solution but is computationally intractable in a real-time setting. In this paper, we present a real-time MPC capable of searching over different driving modalities. Our basic idea is simple: we run several goal-directed parallel trajectory optimizations and score the resulting trajectories based on user-defined meta cos…
RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Institute for Automotive Engineering（汽车工程研究所）
Scenario-based testing for the safety validation of highly automated vehicles is a promising approach that is being examined in research and industry. This approach heavily relies on data from real-world scenarios to derive the necessary scenario information for testing. Measurement data should be collected at a reasonable effort, contain naturalistic behavior of road users and include all data relevant for a description of the identified scenarios in sufficient quality. However, the current measurement methods fail to meet at least one of the requirements. Thus, we propose a novel method to m…
Honda Research Institute（本田研究所）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
This paper proposes a discretionary lane selection algorithm. In particular, highway driving is considered as a targeted scenario, where each lane has a different level of traffic flow. When lane-changing is discretionary, it is advised not to change lanes unless highly beneficial, e.g., reducing travel time significantly or securing higher safety. Evaluating such "benefit" is a challenge, along with multiple surrounding vehicles in dynamic speed and heading with uncertainty. We propose a real-time lane-selection algorithm with careful cost considerations and with modularity in design. The alg…
School of Automobile, Chang’an University（长安大学汽车学院）；School of Automotive Studies, Tongji University（同济大学汽车学院）
A gradual takeover strategy is proposed, in which the dynamic driving privilege assignment in real-time and the driving privilege gradual handover are realized. Firstly, the driving privilege assignment based on the risk level is achieved. The naturalistic driving data is applied to study the driver behavior during danger. TTC (time to collision) is defined as an obvious risk measure, whereas the time before the host vehicle has to brake assuming that the target vehicle is braking is defined as the potential risk measure, i.e. the time margin (TM). A risk assessment algorithm is proposed based…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In dense and dynamic scenarios, planning a safe and comfortable trajectory is full of challenges when traffic participants are driving at high speed. The classic graph search and sampling methods first perform path planning and then configure the corresponding speed, which lacks a strategy to deal with the high-speed obstacles. Decoupling optimization methods perform motion planning in the S-L and S-T domains respectively. These methods require a large free configuration space to plan the lane change trajectory. In dense dynamic scenes, it is easy to cause the failure of trajectory planning an…
POMDP-Based Trajectory Planning for On-Ramp Highway Merging
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学电气工程学院）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学捷克信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）
An enhanced motion planning approach by integrating driving heterogeneity and long-term trajectory prediction for automated driving systems
School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学交通运输与物流学院）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学莱尔土木工程学院）
Numerous groups have applied a variety of deep learning techniques to computer vision problems in highway perception scenarios. In this paper, we presented a number of empirical evaluations of recent deep learning advances. Computer vision, combined with deep learning, has the potential to bring about a relatively inexpensive, robust solution to autonomous driving. To prepare deep learning for industry uptake and practical applications, neural networks will require large data sets that represent all possible driving environments and scenarios. We collect a large data set of highway data and ap…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
It is necessary to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Connected Vehicles (CVs) algorithm before their release and deployment. Current evaluation approach mainly relies on simulation platform with the single-vehicle driving model. The main drawback of it is the lack of network realism. To overcome this problem, we extract naturalistic V2V encounters data from the database, and then separate the primary vehicle encounter category by clustering. A fast mining algorithm is proposed that can be applied to parallel query for further process acceleration. 4,500 encounters are mined f…
Scene understanding is an essential technique in semantic segmentation. Although there exist several datasets that can be used for semantic segmentation, they are mainly focused on semantic image segmentation with large deep neural networks. Therefore, these networks are not useful for real time applications, especially in autonomous driving systems. In order to solve this problem, we make two contributions to semantic segmentation task. The first contribution is that we introduce the semantic video dataset, the Highway Driving dataset, which is a densely annotated benchmark for a semantic vid…
Automated vehicles rely heavily on data-driven methods, especially for complex urban environments. Large datasets of real world measurement data in the form of road user trajectories are crucial for several tasks like road user prediction models or scenario-based safety validation. So far, though, this demand is unmet as no public dataset of urban road user trajectories is available in an appropriate size, quality and variety. By contrast, the highway drone dataset (highD) has recently shown that drones are an efficient method for acquiring naturalistic road user trajectories. Compared to driv…
Naturalistic driving data (NDD) is an important source of information to understand crash causation and human factors and to further develop crash avoidance countermeasures. Videos recorded while driving are often included in such datasets. While there is often a large amount of video data in NDD, only a small portion of them can be annotated by human coders and used for research, which underuses all video data. In this paper, we explored a computer vision method to automatically extract the information we need from videos. More specifically, we developed a 3D ConvNet algorithm to automaticall…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of California at Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Developing an automated vehicle, that can handle complicated driving scenarios and appropriately interact with other road users, requires the ability to semantically learn and understand driving environment, oftentimes, based on analyzing massive amounts of naturalistic driving data. An important paradigm that allows automated vehicles to both learn from human drivers and gain insights is understanding the principal compositions of the entire traffic, termed as traffic primitives. However, the exploding data growth presents a great challenge in extracting primitives from high-dimensional time-…
A Contextual Analysis of Driver-Facing and Dual-View Video Inputs for Distraction Detection in Naturalistic Driving Environments
Environmental Engineering The University of Memphis Memphis, TN, USA Email（环境工程 明尼苏达大学 内华达州法戈 邮箱）；Environmental Engineering North Dakota State University Fargo, ND, USA Email（环境工程 内华达州立大学 内华达州法戈 邮箱）
Recently, multiple naturalistic traffic datasets of human-driven trajectories have been published (e.g., highD, NGSim, and pNEUMA). These datasets have been used in studies that investigate variability in human driving behavior, for example for scenario-based validation of autonomous vehicle (AV) behavior, modeling driver behavior, or validating driver models. Thus far, these studies focused on the variability on an operational level (e.g., velocity profiles during a lane change), not on a tactical level (i.e., to change lanes or not). Investigating the variability on both levels is necessary …
BMW of North America（北美宝马公司）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）
Collecting realistic driving trajectories is crucial for training machine learning models that imitate human driving behavior. Most of today's autonomous driving datasets contain only a few trajectories per location and are recorded with test vehicles that are cautiously driven by trained drivers. In particular in interactive scenarios such as highway merges, the test driver's behavior significantly influences other vehicles. This influence prevents recording the whole traffic space of human driving behavior. In this work, we present a novel methodology to extract trajectories of traffic objec…
In this paper, we presented a preliminary study for tactical driver behavior detection from untrimmed naturalistic driving recordings. While supervised learning based detection is a common approach, it suffers when labeled data is scarce. Manual annotation is both time-consuming and expensive. To emphasize this problem, we experimented on a 104-hour real-world naturalistic driving dataset with a set of predefined driving behaviors annotated. There are three challenges in the dataset. First, predefined driving behaviors are sparse in a naturalistic driving setting. Second, the distribution of d…
Lidar data can be used to generate point clouds for the navigation of autonomous vehicles or mobile robotics platforms. Scan matching, the process of estimating the rigid transformation that best aligns two point clouds, is the basis for lidar odometry, a form of dead reckoning. Lidar odometry is particularly useful when absolute sensors, like GPS, are not available. Here we propose the Iterative Closest Ellipsoidal Transform (ICET), a scan matching algorithm which provides two novel improvements over the current state-of-the-art Normal Distributions Transform (NDT). Like NDT, ICET decomposes …
The most common type of accident on the road is a rear-end crash. These crashes have a significant negative impact on traffic flow and are frequently fatal. To gain a more practical understanding of these scenarios, it is necessary to accurately model car following behaviors that result in rear-end crashes. Numerous studies have been carried out to model drivers' car-following behaviors; however, the majority of these studies have relied on simulated data, which may not accurately represent real-world incidents. Furthermore, most studies are restricted to modeling the ego vehicle's acceleratio…
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis（印第安纳大学与普渡大学印第安纳波利斯联合分校）
Recently, e-scooter-involved crashes have increased significantly but little information is available about the behaviors of on-road e-scooter riders. Most existing e-scooter crash research was based on retrospectively descriptive media reports, emergency room patient records, and crash reports. This paper presents a naturalistic driving study with a focus on e-scooter and vehicle encounters. The goal is to quantitatively measure the behaviors of e-scooter riders in different encounters to help facilitate crash scenario modeling, baseline behavior modeling, and the potential future development…
Spatial-Temporal Perception with Causal Inference for Naturalistic Driving Action Recognition
School of Mechanical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学机械工程学院）；School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学先进技术学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation for Left-Hand Driving in Autonomous Steering
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰事故研究与道路安全中心、昆士兰理工大学）；QUT Centre for Robotics and School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰大学机器人中心及电气工程与计算机科学学院、昆士兰理工大学）
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院（MIT））；Touchstone Evaluations, Inc.（托奇斯通评估公司）
For the foreseeble future, human beings will likely remain an integral part of the driving task, monitoring the AI system as it performs anywhere from just over 0% to just under 100% of the driving. The governing objectives of the MIT Autonomous Vehicle Technology (MIT-AVT) study are to (1) undertake large-scale real-world driving data collection that includes high-definition video to fuel the development of deep learning based internal and external perception systems, (2) gain a holistic understanding of how human beings interact with vehicle automation technology by integrating video data wi…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Analysis and recognition of driving styles are profoundly important to intelligent transportation and vehicle calibration. This paper presents a novel driving style analysis framework using the primitive driving patterns learned from naturalistic driving data. In order to achieve this, first, a Bayesian nonparametric learning method based on a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) is introduced to extract primitive driving patterns from time series driving data without prior knowledge of the number of these patterns. In the Bayesian nonparametric approach, we utilize a hierarchical Dirichlet process…
Lane detection is an essential part of the perception sub-architecture of any automated driving (AD) or advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). When focusing on low-cost, large scale products for automated driving, model-driven approaches for the detection of lane markings have proven good performance. More recently, data-driven approaches have been proposed that target the drivable area / freespace mainly in inner-city applications. Focus of these approaches is less on lane-based driving due to the fact that the lane concept does not fully apply in unstructured, residential inner-city envir…
Research in visual anomaly detection draws much interest due to its applications in surveillance. Common datasets for evaluation are constructed using a stationary camera overlooking a region of interest. Previous research has shown promising results in detecting spatial as well as temporal anomalies in these settings. The advent of self-driving cars provides an opportunity to apply visual anomaly detection in a more dynamic application yet no dataset exists in this type of environment. This paper presents a new anomaly detection dataset - the Highway Traffic Anomaly (HTA) dataset - for the pr…
University of North Carolina Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Vehicle Trajectory datasets that provide multiple point-of-views (POVs) can be valuable for various traffic safety and management applications. Despite the abundance of trajectory datasets, few offer a comprehensive and diverse range of driving scenes, capturing multiple viewpoints of various highway layouts, merging lanes, and configurations. This limits their ability to capture the nuanced interactions between drivers, vehicles, and the roadway infrastructure. We introduce the \emph{Carolinas Highway Dataset (CHD\footnote{\emph{CHD} available at: \url{https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/Carolinas…
