13,608 research outputs found
Improving Automated Driving through Planning with Human Internal States
This work examines the hypothesis that partially observable Markov decision
process (POMDP) planning with human driver internal states can significantly
improve both safety and efficiency in autonomous freeway driving. We evaluate
this hypothesis in a simulated scenario where an autonomous car must safely
perform three lane changes in rapid succession. Approximate POMDP solutions are
obtained through the partially observable Monte Carlo planning with observation
widening (POMCPOW) algorithm. This approach outperforms over-confident and
conservative MDP baselines and matches or outperforms QMDP. Relative to the MDP
baselines, POMCPOW typically cuts the rate of unsafe situations in half or
increases the success rate by 50%.Comment: Preprint before submission to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent
Transportation Systems. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.0085
Decision-Making for Automated Vehicles Using a Hierarchical Behavior-Based Arbitration Scheme
Behavior planning and decision-making are some of the biggest challenges for
highly automated systems. A fully automated vehicle (AV) is confronted with
numerous tactical and strategical choices. Most state-of-the-art AV platforms
implement tactical and strategical behavior generation using finite state
machines. However, these usually result in poor explainability, maintainability
and scalability. Research in robotics has raised many architectures to mitigate
these problems, most interestingly behavior-based systems and hybrid
derivatives. Inspired by these approaches, we propose a hierarchical
behavior-based architecture for tactical and strategical behavior generation in
automated driving. It is a generalizing and scalable decision-making framework,
utilizing modular behavior blocks to compose more complex behaviors in a
bottom-up approach. The system is capable of combining a variety of scenario-
and methodology-specific solutions, like POMDPs, RRT* or learning-based
behavior, into one understandable and traceable architecture. We extend the
hierarchical behavior-based arbitration concept to address scenarios where
multiple behavior options are applicable but have no clear priority against
each other. Then, we formulate the behavior generation stack for automated
driving in urban and highway environments, incorporating parking and emergency
behaviors as well. Finally, we illustrate our design in an explanatory
evaluation
Towards Social Autonomous Vehicles: Efficient Collision Avoidance Scheme Using Richardson's Arms Race Model
Background Road collisions and casualties pose a serious threat to commuters
around the globe. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) aim to make the use of technology
to reduce the road accidents. However, the most of research work in the context
of collision avoidance has been performed to address, separately, the rear end,
front end and lateral collisions in less congested and with high
inter-vehicular distances. Purpose The goal of this paper is to introduce the
concept of a social agent, which interact with other AVs in social manners like
humans are social having the capability of predicting intentions, i.e.
mentalizing and copying the actions of each other, i.e. mirroring. The proposed
social agent is based on a human-brain inspired mentalizing and mirroring
capabilities and has been modelled for collision detection and avoidance under
congested urban road traffic.
Method We designed our social agent having the capabilities of mentalizing
and mirroring and for this purpose we utilized Exploratory Agent Based Modeling
(EABM) level of Cognitive Agent Based Computing (CABC) framework proposed by
Niazi and Hussain.
Results Our simulation and practical experiments reveal that by embedding
Richardson's arms race model within AVs, collisions can be avoided while
travelling on congested urban roads in a flock like topologies. The performance
of the proposed social agent has been compared at two different levels.Comment: 48 pages, 21 figure
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Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving: from Algorithms to Fundamental Aspects
Inevitably, autonomous vehicles need to interact with other road participants in a variety of highly complex or critical driving scenarios. It is still an extremely challenging task even for the forefront companies or institutes to enable autonomous vehicles to interactively predict the behavior of others, and plan safe and high-quality motions accordingly. The major obstacles are not just originated from prediction and planning algorithms with insufficient performances. Several fundamental problems in the fields of interactive prediction and planning still remain open, such as formulation, representation and evaluation of interactive prediction methods, motion dataset with densely interactive driving behavior, as well as interface of interactive prediction and planning algorithms. The aforementioned fundamental aspects of interactive prediction and planning are addressed in this dissertation along with various kinds of algorithms. First, generic environmental representation for various scenarios with topological decomposition is constructed, and a corresponding planning algorithm is designed by combining graph search and optimization. Hard constraints in optimization-based planners are also incorporated into the training loss of imitation learning so that the policy net can generate safe and feasible motions in highly constrained scenarios. Unified problem formulation and motion representation are designed for different paradigms of interactive predictors such as planning-based prediction (inverse reinforcement learning), as well as probabilistic graphical models (hidden Markov model) and deep neural networks (mixture density network), which are utilized for the prediction/planning interface design and prediction benchmark. A framework combing decision network and graph-search/optimization/sample-based planner is proposed to achieve a driving strategy which is defensive to potential violations of others, but not overly conservatively to threats of low probabilities. Such driving strategy is achieved via experiments based on the aforementioned interactive prediction and planning algorithms with proper interface designed. These predictors are also evaluated from closed loop perspective considering planning fatality when using the prediction results instead of pure data approximation metrics. Finally, INTERACTION (INTERnational, Adversarial and Cooperative moTION) dataset with highly interactive driving scenarios and behavior from international locations is constructed with interaction density metric defined to compare different datasets. The dataset has been utilized for various behavior-related research areas such as prediction, planning, imitation learning and behavior modeling, and is inspiring new research fields such as representation learning, interaction extraction and scenario generation
Belief State Planning for Autonomously Navigating Urban Intersections
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 several
relevant metrics that measure both safety and efficiency.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IV201
Situation-Aware Left-Turning Connected and Automated Vehicle Operation at Signalized Intersections
One challenging aspect of the Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) operation
in mixed traffic is the development of a situation-awareness module for CAVs.
While operating on public roads, CAVs need to assess their surroundings,
especially the intentions of non-CAVs. Generally, CAVs demonstrate a defensive
driving behavior, and CAVs expect other non-autonomous entities on the road
will follow the traffic rules or common driving behavior. However, the presence
of aggressive human drivers in the surrounding environment, who may not follow
traffic rules and behave abruptly, can lead to serious safety consequences. In
this paper, we have addressed the CAV and non-CAV interaction by evaluating a
situation-awareness module for left-turning CAV operations in an urban area.
Existing literature does not consider the intent of the following vehicle for a
CAVs left-turning movement, and existing CAV controllers do not assess the
following non-CAVs intents. Based on our simulation study, the situation-aware
CAV controller module reduces up to 27% of the abrupt braking of the following
non-CAVs for scenarios with different opposing through movement compared to the
base scenario with the autonomous vehicle, without considering the following
vehicles intent. The analysis shows that the average travel time reductions for
the opposite through traffic volumes of 600, 800, and 1000 vehicle/hour/lane
are 58%, 52%, and 62%, respectively, for the aggressive human driver following
the CAV if the following vehicles intent is considered by a CAV in making a
left turn at an intersection
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