Efficient trajectory planning for urban intersections is currently one of the most challenging tasks for an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). Courteous behavior towards other traffic participants, the AV's comfort and its progression in the environment are the key aspects that determine the performance of trajectory planning algorithms. To capture these aspects, we propose a novel trajectory planning framework that ensures social compliance and simultaneously optimizes the AV's comfort subject to kinematic constraints. The framework combines a local continuous optimization approach and an efficient driver model to ensure fast behavior prediction, maneuver generation and decision making over long horizons. The proposed framework is evaluated in different scenarios to demonstrate its capabilities in terms of the resulting trajectories and runtime.
Multi-Vehicle Trajectory Planning at V2I-enabled Intersections based on Correlated Equilibrium
Tongji University（同济大学）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学上海智能自主系统研究院）；National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems（自主智能无人系统全国重点实验室）；Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Ministry of Education（教育部智能自主系统前沿科学中心）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Honda Research Institute（本田研究所）
Urban intersections represent a complex environment for autonomous vehicles with many sources of uncertainty. The vehicle must plan in a stochastic environment with potentially rapid changes in driver behavior. Providing an efficient strategy to navigate through urban intersections is a difficult task. This paper frames the problem of navigating unsignalized intersections as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solves it using a Monte Carlo sampling method. Empirical results in simulation show that the resulting policy outperforms a threshold-based heuristic strategy on s…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；Inria Paris - Rocquencourt（法国国立信息与自动化研究院巴黎-罗克库尔中心）
We consider the problem of coordinating a collection of robots at an intersection area taking into account dynamical constraints due to actuator limitations. We adopt the coordination space approach, which is standard in multiple robot motion planning. Assuming the priorities between robots are assigned in advance and the existence of a collision-free trajectory respecting those priorities, we propose a provably safe trajectory planner satisfying kinodynamic constraints. The algorithm is shown to run in real time and to return safe (collision-free) trajectories. Simulation results on synthetic…
Road user behavior prediction is one of the most critical components in trajectory planning for autonomous driving, especially in urban scenarios involving traffic signals. In this paper, a hierarchical framework is proposed to predict vehicle behaviors at a signalized intersection, using the traffic signal information of the intersection. The framework is composed of two phases: a discrete intention prediction phase and a continuous trajectory prediction phase. In the discrete intention prediction phase, a Bayesian network is adopted to predict the vehicle's high-level intention, after that, …
A Human-Oriented Cooperative Driving Approach: Integrating Driving Intention, State, and Conflict
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（软件工程学院，西安交通大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University（人工智能学院，西安交通大学）；School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（机械与航空航天工程学院，南洋理工大学）
Curve Trajectory Model for Human Preferred Path Planning of Automated Vehicles
Vehicle Research Center, Szechenyi Istvan University（塞切尼伊什特万大学车辆研究中心）；Institute for Computer Science and Control（计算机科学与控制研究所）；Robert Bosch Kft（罗伯特·博世有限公司）
We propose GameOpt: a novel hybrid approach to cooperative intersection control for dynamic, multi-lane, unsignalized intersections. Safely navigating these complex and accident prone intersections requires simultaneous trajectory planning and negotiation among drivers. GameOpt is a hybrid formulation that first uses an auction mechanism to generate a priority entrance sequence for every agent, followed by an optimization-based trajectory planner that computes velocity controls that satisfy the priority sequence. This coupling operates at real-time speeds of less than 10 milliseconds in high d…
Unifying Decision-Making and Trajectory-Planning in Unsignalized Intersections Using Time-Varying Potential Fields
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni, Politecnico di Torino（电子工程与电信学院，托斯卡纳理工学院）；Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino（自动化与信息学院，托斯卡纳理工学院）
Current advances in the development of autonomous cars suggest that driverless cars may see wide-scale deployment in the near future. Research by both industry and academia is driven by potential benefits of this new technology, including reductions in fatalities and improvements in traffic and fuel efficiency as well as greater mobility for people who will or cannot drive cars themselves. A deciding factor for the adoption of self-driving cars besides safety will be the comfort of the passengers. This report looks at cost functions currently used in motion planning methods for autonomous on-r…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；KA-RaceIng e.V.（KA-RaceIng赛车协会）
This report describes our approach to design and evaluate a software stack for a race car capable of achieving competitive driving performance in the different disciplines of the Formula Student Driverless. By using a 360° LiDAR and optionally three cameras, we reliably recognize the plastic cones that mark the track boundaries at distances of around 35 m, enabling us to drive at the physical limits of the car. Using a GraphSLAM algorithm, we are able to map these cones with a root-mean-square error of less than 15 cm while driving at speeds of over 70 kph on a narrow track. The high-precision…
DSIP: A Dynamic Coordination Planner for Signal-Free Intersections using Diffusion-Model-Based Multi-Agent Motion Planning
Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学全球未来技术学院）；School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学自动化与智能感知学院）；Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校电气工程系）
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）
Widespread development of driverless vehicles has led to the formation of autonomous racing, where technological development is accelerated by the high speeds and competitive environment of motorsport. A particular challenge for an autonomous vehicle is that of identifying a target trajectory - or, in the case of a competition vehicle, the racing line. Many existing approaches to finding the racing line are either not time-optimal solutions, or are computationally expensive - rendering them unsuitable for real-time application using on-board processing hardware. This study describes a machine …
Biasing the Driving Style of an Artificial Race Driver for Online Time-Optimal Maneuver Planning
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento（工业工程系，特伦托大学）；Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Politecnico di Bari（电气与信息工程系，巴里理工学院）；Professorship of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, Technical University of Munich（自主车辆系统教授职位，慕尼黑技术大学）
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
We present a novel approach to automatically identify driver behaviors from vehicle trajectories and use them for safe navigation of autonomous vehicles. We propose a novel set of features that can be easily extracted from car trajectories. We derive a data-driven mapping between these features and six driver behaviors using an elaborate web-based user study. We also compute a summarized score indicating a level of awareness that is needed while driving next to other vehicles. We also incorporate our algorithm into a vehicle navigation simulation system and demonstrate its benefits in terms of…
Zenuity AB（泽纽蒂公司）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；AI Innovation of Sweden（瑞典人工智能创新中心）
In this paper, we propose a decision making algorithm intended for automated vehicles that negotiate with other possibly non-automated vehicles in intersections. The decision algorithm is separated into two parts: a high-level decision module based on reinforcement learning, and a low-level planning module based on model predictive control. Traffic is simulated with numerous predefined driver behaviors and intentions, and the performance of the proposed decision algorithm was evaluated against another controller. The results show that the proposed decision algorithm yields shorter training epi…
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…
Studies have shown that autonomous vehicles (AVs) behave conservatively in a traffic environment composed of human drivers and do not adapt to local conditions and socio-cultural norms. It is known that socially aware AVs can be designed if there exist a mechanism to understand the behaviors of human drivers. We present a notion of Machine Theory of Mind (M-ToM) to infer the behaviors of human drivers by observing the trajectory of their vehicles. Our M-ToM approach, called StylePredict, is based on trajectory analysis of vehicles, which has been investigated in robotics and computer vision. S…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Navigation through uncontrolled intersections is one of the key challenges for autonomous vehicles. Identifying the subtle differences in hidden traits of other drivers can bring significant benefits when navigating in such environments. We propose an unsupervised method for inferring driver traits such as driving styles from observed vehicle trajectories. We use a variational autoencoder with recurrent neural networks to learn a latent representation of traits without any ground truth trait labels. Then, we use this trait representation to learn a policy for an autonomous vehicle to navigate …
We present a new method for multi-agent planning involving human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in unsignaled intersections, roundabouts, and during merging. In multi-agent planning, the main challenge is to predict the actions of other agents, especially human drivers, as their intentions are hidden from other agents. Our algorithm uses game theory to develop a new auction, called GamePlan, that directly determines the optimal action for each agent based on their driving style (which is observable via commonly available sensors). GamePlan assigns a higher priority to more aggressive or…
Highway driving invariably combines high speeds with the need to interact closely with other drivers. Prediction methods enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to anticipate drivers' future trajectories and plan accordingly. Kinematic methods for prediction have traditionally ignored the presence of other drivers, or made predictions only for a limited set of scenarios. Data-driven approaches fill this gap by learning from large datasets to predict trajectories in general scenarios. While they achieve high accuracy, they also lose the interpretability and tools for model validation enjoyed by kinema…
Honda Research Institute (HRI) Europe（本田欧洲研究院（HRI Europe））；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
This work addresses the task of risk evaluation in traffic scenarios with limited observability due to restricted sensorial coverage. Here, we concentrate on intersection scenarios that are difficult to access visually. To identify the area of sight, we employ ray casting on a local dynamic map providing geometrical information and road infrastructure. Based on the area with reduced visibility, we first model scene entities that pose a potential risk without being visually perceivable yet. Then, we predict a worst-case trajectory in the survival analysis for collision risk estimation. Resultin…
Traditional approaches to prediction of future trajectory of road agents rely on knowing information about their past trajectory. This work rather relies only on having knowledge of the current state and intended direction to make predictions for multiple vehicles at intersections. Furthermore, message passing of this information between the vehicles provides each one of them a more holistic overview of the environment allowing for a more informed prediction. This is done by training a neural network which takes the state and intent of the multiple vehicles to predict their future trajectory. …
Forecasting trajectories of human-driven vehicles is a crucial problem in autonomous driving. Trajectory forecasting in the urban area is particularly hard due to complex interactions with cars and pedestrians, and traffic lights (TLs). Unlike the former that has been widely studied, the impact of TLs on the trajectory prediction has been rarely discussed. In this work, we first identify the less studied, perhaps overlooked impact of TLs. Second, we present a novel resolution that is mindful of the impact, inspired by the fact that human drives differently depending on signal phase (green, yel…
Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Predicting the motion of a driver's vehicle is crucial for advanced driving systems, enabling detection of potential risks towards shared control between the driver and automation systems. In this paper, we propose a variational neural network approach that predicts future driver trajectory distributions for the vehicle based on multiple sensors. Our predictor generates both a conditional variational distribution of future trajectories, as well as a confidence estimate for different time horizons. Our approach allows us to handle inherently uncertain situations, and reason about information ga…
We focus on decentralized navigation among multiple non-communicating rational agents at \emph{uncontrolled} intersections, i.e., street intersections without traffic signs or signals. Avoiding collisions in such domains relies on the ability of agents to predict each others' intentions reliably, and react quickly. Multiagent trajectory prediction is NP-hard whereas the sample complexity of existing data-driven approaches limits their applicability. Our key insight is that the geometric structure of the intersection and the incentive of agents to move efficiently and avoid collisions (rational…
Studies have shown that autonomous vehicles (AVs) behave conservatively in a traffic environment composed of human drivers and do not adapt to local conditions and socio-cultural norms. It is known that socially aware AVs can be designed if there exists a mechanism to understand the behaviors of human drivers. We present an approach that leverages machine learning to predict, the behaviors of human drivers. This is similar to how humans implicitly interpret the behaviors of drivers on the road, by only observing the trajectories of their vehicles. We use graph-theoretic tools to extract driver…
Surrogate safety measures in the form of conflict indicators are indispensable components of the proactive traffic safety toolbox. Conflict indicators can be classified into past-trajectory-based conflicts and predicted-trajectory-based conflicts. While the calculation of the former class of conflicts is deterministic and unambiguous, the latter category is computed using predicted vehicle trajectories and is thus more stochastic. Consequently, the accuracy of prediction-based conflicts is contingent on the accuracy of the utilized trajectory prediction algorithm. Trajectory prediction can be …
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；École des Ponts ParisTech（巴黎高科桥路学校）
In order to drive safely and efficiently on public roads, autonomous vehicles will have to understand the intentions of surrounding vehicles, and adapt their own behavior accordingly. If experienced human drivers are generally good at inferring other vehicles' motion up to a few seconds in the future, most current Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) are unable to perform such medium-term forecasts, and are usually limited to high-likelihood situations such as emergency braking. In this article, we present a first step towards consistent trajectory prediction by introducing a long short-…
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校机械科学与工程系）
Autonomous agents must be able to safely interact with other vehicles to integrate into urban environments. The safety of these agents is dependent on their ability to predict collisions with other vehicles' future trajectories for replanning and collision avoidance. The information needed to predict collisions can be learned from previously observed vehicle trajectories in a specific environment, generating a traffic model. The learned traffic model can then be incorporated as prior knowledge into any trajectory estimation method being used in this environment. This work presents a Gaussian p…
Improving the Intelligent Driver Model by Incorporating Vehicle Dynamics: Microscopic Calibration and Macroscopic Validation
Research Institute of Automotive Engineering and Vehicle Engines Stuttgart (FKFS)（斯图加特汽车工程与车辆发动机研究所（FKFS））；Institute of Automotive Engineering (IFS), University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学汽车工程研究所（IFS））
Knowledge-Informed Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction at Signalized Intersections for Infrastructure-to-Everything
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology, Tongji University（同济大学上海智能科学与技术研究院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学电子与计算机工程系）
Institute of Power Machinery and Vehicular Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学动力机械及车辆工程研究所）
Unsignalized intersection driving is challenging for automated vehicles. For safe and efficient performances, the diverse and dynamic behaviors of interacting vehicles should be considered. Based on a game-theoretic framework, a human-like payoff design methodology is proposed for the automated decision at unsignalized intersections. Prospect Theory is introduced to map the objective collision risk to the subjective driver payoffs, and the driving style can be quantified as a tradeoff between safety and speed. To account for the dynamics of interaction, a probabilistic model is further introdu…
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学生产技术研究所）
For the optimum design of a driver-automation shared control system, an understanding of driver behavior based on measurements and modeling is crucial early in the development process. This paper presents a driver model through a weighting process of visual guidance from the road ahead and haptic guidance from a steering system for a lane-following task. The proposed weighting process describes the interaction of a driver with the haptic guidance steering and the driver reliance on it. A driving simulator experiment is conducted to identify the model parameters for driving manually and with ha…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Waymo（Waymo公司）
Interactive driving scenarios, such as lane changes, merges and unprotected turns, are some of the most challenging situations for autonomous driving. Planning in interactive scenarios requires accurately modeling the reactions of other agents to different future actions of the ego agent. We develop end-to-end models for conditional behavior prediction (CBP) that take as an input a query future trajectory for an ego-agent, and predict distributions over future trajectories for other agents conditioned on the query. Leveraging such a model, we develop a general-purpose agent interactivity score…
Vehicle control algorithms exploiting connectivity and automation, such as Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), have the opportunity to improve energy savings. However, lower levels of automation involve a human-machine interaction stage, where the presence of a human driver affects the performance of the control algorithm in closed loop. This occurs for instance in the case of Eco-Driving control algorithms implemented as a velocity advisory system, where the driver is displayed an optimal speed trajectory to follow to reduce energy consumption…
This paper presents a novel incremental learning algorithm for pedestrian motion prediction, with the ability to improve the learned model over time when data is incrementally available. In this setup, trajectories are modeled as simple segments called motion primitives. Transitions between motion primitives are modeled as Gaussian Processes. When new data is available, the motion primitives learned from the new data are compared with the previous ones by measuring the inner product of the motion primitive vectors. Similar motion primitives and transitions are fused and novel motion primitives…
How autonomous vehicles and human drivers share public transportation systems is an important problem, as fully automatic transportation environments are still a long way off. Understanding human drivers' behavior can be beneficial for autonomous vehicle decision making and planning, especially when the autonomous vehicle is surrounded by human drivers who have various driving behaviors and patterns of interaction with other vehicles. In this paper, we propose an LSTM-based trajectory prediction method for human drivers which can help the autonomous vehicle make better decisions, especially in…
For autonomous vehicles, effective behavior planning is crucial to ensure safety of the ego car. In many urban scenarios, it is hard to create sufficiently general heuristic rules, especially for challenging scenarios that some new human drivers find difficult. In this work, we propose a behavior planning structure based on reinforcement learning (RL) which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle behavior planning with a hierarchical structure in simulated urban environments. Application of the hierarchical structure allows the various layers of the behavior planning system to be satisfied…
NEC Corporation（日本电气公司）；Samsung Electronics（三星电子）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must interact with a diverse set of human drivers in heterogeneous geographic areas. Ideally, fleets of AVs should share trajectory data to continually re-train and improve trajectory forecasting models from collective experience using cloud-based distributed learning. At the same time, these robots should ideally avoid uploading raw driver interaction data in order to protect proprietary policies (when sharing insights with other companies) or protect driver privacy from insurance companies. Federated learning (FL) is a popular mechanism to learn models in cloud serv…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）；University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Trajectory data analysis is an essential component for highly automated driving. Complex models developed with these data predict other road users' movement and behavior patterns. Based on these predictions - and additional contextual information such as the course of the road, (traffic) rules, and interaction with other road users - the highly automated vehicle (HAV) must be able to reliably and safely perform the task assigned to it, e.g., moving from point A to B. Ideally, the HAV moves safely through its environment, just as we would expect a human driver to do. However, if unusual traject…
FLUID: A Fine-Grained Lightweight Urban Signalized-Intersection Dataset of Dense Conflict Trajectories
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（智能系统工程学院，中山大学）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Transportation Systems（广东省智能交通系统重点实验室）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
