Driver Digital Twin for Online Prediction of Personalized Lane Change Behavior

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are supposed to share the road with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) in a foreseeable future. Therefore, considering the mixed traffic environment is more pragmatic, as the well-planned operation of CAVs may be interrupted by HDVs. In the circumstance that human behaviors have significant impacts, CAVs need to understand HDV behaviors to make safe actions. In this study, we develop a Driver Digital Twin (DDT) for the online prediction of personalized lane change behavior, allowing CAVs to predict surrounding vehicles' behaviors with the help of the digital twin technology. DDT is deployed on a vehicle-edge-cloud architecture, where the cloud server models the driver behavior for each HDV based on the historical naturalistic driving data, while the edge server processes the real-time data from each driver with his/her digital twin on the cloud to predict the lane change maneuver. The proposed system is first evaluated on a human-in-the-loop co-simulation platform, and then in a field implementation with three passenger vehicles connected through the 4G/LTE cellular network. The lane change intention can be recognized in 6 seconds on average before the vehicle crosses the lane separation line, and the Mean Euclidean Distance between the predicted trajectory and GPS ground truth is 1.03 meters within a 4-second prediction window. Compared to the general model, using a personalized model can improve prediction accuracy by 27.8%. The demonstration video of the proposed system can be watched at https://youtu.be/5cbsabgIOdM

Early Lane Change Prediction for Automated Driving Systems Using Multi-Task Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks

Lane change (LC) is one of the safety-critical manoeuvres in highway driving according to various road accident records. Thus, reliably predicting such manoeuvre in advance is critical for the safe and comfortable operation of automated driving systems. The majority of previous studies rely on detecting a manoeuvre that has been already started, rather than predicting the manoeuvre in advance. Furthermore, most of the previous works do not estimate the key timings of the manoeuvre (e.g., crossing time), which can actually yield more useful information for the decision making in the ego vehicle. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel multi-task model to simultaneously estimate the likelihood of LC manoeuvres and the time-to-lane-change (TTLC). In both tasks, an attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as a shared feature extractor from a bird's eye view representation of the driving environment. The spatial attention used in the CNN model improves the feature extraction process by focusing on the most relevant areas of the surrounding environment. In addition, two novel curriculum learning schemes are employed to train the proposed approach. The extensive evaluation and comparative analysis of the proposed method in existing benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art LC prediction models, particularly considering long-term prediction performance.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure