PiP: Planning-informed Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

It is critical to predict the motion of surrounding vehicles for self-driving planning, especially in a socially compliant and flexible way. However, future prediction is challenging due to the interaction and uncertainty in driving behaviors. We propose planning-informed trajectory prediction (PiP) to tackle the prediction problem in the multi-agent setting. Our approach is differentiated from the traditional manner of prediction, which is only based on historical information and decoupled with planning. By informing the prediction process with the planning of ego vehicle, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance of multi-agent forecasting on highway datasets. Moreover, our approach enables a novel pipeline which couples the prediction and planning, by conditioning PiP on multiple candidate trajectories of the ego vehicle, which is highly beneficial for autonomous driving in interactive scenarios.Comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020; Project page at http://haoran-song.github.io/planning-informed-predictio

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

Game theoretic decision making for autonomous vehicles’ merge manoeuvre in high traffic scenarios

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