Dueling Deep Q Network for Highway Decision Making in Autonomous Vehicles: A Case Study
College of Automotive Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学汽车工程学院）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与 mobility学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Teng Liu, Xingyu Mu, Xiaolin Tang, Bing Huang, Hong Wang, Dongpu Cao
This work optimizes the highway decision making strategy of autonomous vehicles by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, the highway driving environment is built, wherein the ego vehicle, surrounding vehicles, and road lanes are included. Then, the overtaking decision-making problem of the automated vehicle is formulated as an optimal control problem. Then relevant control actions, state variables, and optimization objectives are elaborated. Finally, the deep Q-network is applied to derive the intelligent driving policies for the ego vehicle. Simulation results reveal that the ego vehicle could safely and efficiently accomplish the driving task after learning and training.
Decision-making for Autonomous Vehicles on Highway: Deep Reinforcement Learning with Continuous Action Horizon
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学机械与运载工程学院）；Department of Industrial Design, Chongqing Normal University（重庆师范大学工业设计系）
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Yangtze Normal University（长江师范学院数学与统计学院）；College of Automotive Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学汽车工程学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Autonomous driving is a promising technology to reduce traffic accidents and improve driving efficiency. In this work, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-enabled decision-making policy is constructed for autonomous vehicles to address the overtaking behaviors on the highway. First, a highway driving environment is founded, wherein the ego vehicle aims to pass through the surrounding vehicles with an efficient and safe maneuver. A hierarchical control framework is presented to control these vehicles, which indicates the upper-level manages the driving decisions, and the lower-level cares about…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Warwick Manufacturing Group（华威制造集团）
Autonomous driving decision-making is a challenging task due to the inherent complexity and uncertainty in traffic. For example, adjacent vehicles may change their lane or overtake at any time to pass a slow vehicle or to help traffic flow. Anticipating the intention of surrounding vehicles, estimating their future states and integrating them into the decision-making process of an automated vehicle can enhance the reliability of autonomous driving in complex driving scenarios. This paper proposes a Prediction-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (PDRL) decision-making model that considers the man…
Amazon（亚马逊）；University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）
Given the aging infrastructure and the anticipated growing number of highway work zones in the United States, it is important to investigate work zone merge control, which is critical for improving work zone safety and capacity. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel highway work zone merge control strategy based on cooperative driving behavior enabled by artificial intelligence. The proposed method assumes that all vehicles are fully automated, connected and cooperative. It inserts two metering zones in the open lane to make space for merging vehicles in the closed lane. In addition, each …
Fault-Tolerant MARL for CAVs under Observation Perturbations for Highway On-Ramp Merging
Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（自动化系，清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist），清华大学）
The use of neural networks and reinforcement learning has become increasingly popular in autonomous vehicle control. However, the opaqueness of the resulting control policies presents a significant barrier to deploying neural network-based control in autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning based approach to autonomous vehicle longitudinal control, where the rule-based safety cages provide enhanced safety for the vehicle as well as weak supervision to the reinforcement learning agent. By guiding the agent to meaningful states and actions, this weak supervision im…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Lyles School of Civil Engineering（莱尔土木工程学院）；Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT)（连通与自动化交通中心（CCAT））；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Robotics Institute（机器人研究所）
Active Traffic Management strategies are often adopted in real-time to address such sudden flow breakdowns. When queuing is imminent, Speed Harmonization (SH), which adjusts speeds in upstream traffic to mitigate traffic showckwaves downstream, can be applied. However, because SH depends on driver awareness and compliance, it may not always be effective in mitigating congestion. The use of multiagent reinforcement learning for collaborative learning, is a promising solution to this challenge. By incorporating this technique in the control algorithms of connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV), i…
The steady increase in the number of vehicles operating on the highways continues to exacerbate congestion, accidents, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. Emerging mobility systems, e.g., connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), have the potential to directly address these issues and improve transportation network efficiency and safety. In this paper, we consider a highway merging scenario and propose a framework for coordinating CAVs such that stop-and-go driving is eliminated. We use a decentralized form of the actor-critic approach to deep reinforcement learning$-$multi-agent …
Implementing an autonomous vehicle that is able to output feasible, smooth and efficient trajectories is a long-standing challenge. Several approaches have been considered, roughly falling under two categories: rule-based and learning-based approaches. The rule-based approaches, while guaranteeing safety and feasibility, fall short when it comes to long-term planning and generalization. The learning-based approaches are able to account for long-term planning and generalization to unseen situations, but may fail to achieve smoothness, safety and the feasibility which rule-based approaches ensur…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Orange Labs Services（奥兰治实验室服务公司）
In this paper, a framework for lane merge coordination is presented utilising a centralised system, for connected vehicles. The delivery of trajectory recommendations to the connected vehicles on the road is based on a Traffic Orchestrator and a Data Fusion as the main components. Deep Reinforcement Learning and data analysis is used to predict trajectory recommendations for connected vehicles, taking into account unconnected vehicles for those suggestions. The results highlight the adaptability of the Traffic Orchestrator, when employing Dueling Deep Q-Network in an unseen real world merging …
From Observation to Prediction: LSTM for Vehicle Lane Change Forecasting on Highway On/Off-Ramps
C-DRiVeS Lab: Cognitive Driving Research in Vehicular Systems（C-DRiVeS实验室：车载系统认知驾驶研究）；Computer Science and Engineering Department - Faculty of Media Engineering and Technology - German University in Cairo（计算机科学与工程系 - 媒体工程与技术学院 - 埃及德国大学）
University of Engineering and Technology Peshawar（白沙瓦工程技术大学）；University of Swabi（斯瓦比大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）；Jessore University of Science and Technology（杰索尔科技大学）
Vehicle speed monitoring and management of highways is the critical problem of the road in this modern age of growing technology and population. A poor management results in frequent traffic jam, traffic rules violation and fatal road accidents. Using traditional techniques of RADAR, LIDAR and LASAR to address this problem is time-consuming, expensive and tedious. This paper presents an efficient framework to produce a simple, cost efficient and intelligent system for vehicle speed monitoring. The proposed method uses an HD (High Definition) camera mounted on the road side either on a pole or …
Interest in emergent communication has recently surged in Machine Learning. The focus of this interest has largely been either on investigating the properties of the learned protocol or on utilizing emergent communication to better solve problems that already have a viable solution. Here, we consider self-driving cars coordinating with each other and focus on how communication influences the agents' collective behavior. Our main result is that communication helps (most) with adverse conditions.
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
Real-time safety systems are crucial components of intelligent vehicles. This paper introduces a prediction-based collision risk assessment approach on highways. Given a point mass vehicle dynamics system, a stochastic forward reachable set considering two-dimensional motion with vehicle state probability distributions is firstly established. We then develop an acceleration prediction model, which provides multi-modal probabilistic acceleration distributions to propagate vehicle states. The collision probability is calculated by summing up the probabilities of the states where two vehicles spa…
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…
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…
Univeridad de Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
This work presents a novel method for predicting vehicle trajectories in highway scenarios using efficient bird's eye view representations and convolutional neural networks. Vehicle positions, motion histories, road configuration, and vehicle interactions are easily included in the prediction model using basic visual representations. The U-net model has been selected as the prediction kernel to generate future visual representations of the scene using an image-to-image regression approach. A method has been implemented to extract vehicle positions from the generated graphical representations t…
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…
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…
