Self-driving vehicles will soon be a reality, as main automotive companies have announced that they will sell their driving automation modes in the 2020s. This technology raises relevant controversies, especially with recent deadly accidents. Nevertheless, autonomous vehicles are still popular and attractive thanks to the improvement they represent to people’s way of life (safer and quicker transit, more accessible, comfortable, convenient, efficient, and environment-friendly). This paper presents a review of motion planning techniques over the last decade with a focus on highway planning. In the context of this article, motion planning denotes path generation and decision making. Highway situations limit the problem to high speed and small curvature roads, with specific driver rules, under a constrained environment framework. Lane change, obstacle avoidance, car following, and merging are the situations addressed in this paper. After a brief introduction to the context of autonomous ground vehicles, the detailed conditions for motion planning are described. The main algorithms in motion planning, their features, and their applications to highway driving are reviewed, along with current and future challenges and open issues.

/pdf/a-review-of-motion-planning-for-highway-autonomous-driving-56ou2tzah8.pdf

A Review of Motion Planning for Highway Autonomous Driving

This paper presents a method for constructing human-robot interaction policies in settings where multimodality, i.e., the possibility of multiple highly distinct futures, plays a critical role in decision making. We are motivated in this work by the example of traffic weaving, e.g., at highway on-ramps/off-ramps, where entering and exiting cars must swap lanes in a short distance-a challenging negotiation even for experienced drivers due to the inherent multimodal uncertainty of who will pass whom. Our approach is to learn multimodal probability distributions over future human actions from a dataset of human-human exemplars and perform real-time robot policy construction in the resulting environment model through massively parallel sampling of human responses to candidate robot action sequences. Direct learning of these distributions is made possible by recent advances in the theory of conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs), whereby we learn action distributions simultaneously conditioned on the present interaction history, as well as candidate future robot actions in order to take into account response dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach with a human-in-the-loop simulation of a traffic weaving scenario.

Multimodal Probabilistic Model-Based Planning for Human-Robot Interaction

Advanced planning for autonomous vehicles using reinforcement learning and deep inverse reinforcement learning

Autonomous driving has been the subject of incre- ased interest in recent years both in industry and in academia. Serious efforts are being pursued to address legal, technical, and logistical problems and make autonomous cars a viable option for everyday transportation. One significant challenge is the time and effort required for the verification and validation of the decision and control algorithms employed in these vehicles to ensure a safe and comfortable driving experience. Hundreds of thousands of miles of driving tests are required to achieve a well calibrated control system that is capable of operating an autonomous vehicle in an uncertain traffic environment where interactions among multiple drivers and vehicles occur simultaneously. Traffic simulators where these interactions can be modeled and represented with reasonable fidelity can help to decrease the time and effort necessary for the development of the autonomous driving control algorithms by providing a venue where acceptable initial control calibrations can be achieved quickly and safely before actual road tests. In this paper, we present a game theoretic traffic model that can be used to: 1) test and compare various autonomous vehicle decision and control systems and 2) calibrate the parameters of an existing control system. We demonstrate two example case studies, where, in the first case, we test and quantitatively compare two autonomous vehicle control systems in terms of their safety and performance, and, in the second case, we optimize the parameters of an autonomous vehicle control system, utilizing the proposed traffic model and simulation environment.

Game Theoretic Modeling of Driver and Vehicle Interactions for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Vehicle Control Systems

Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology can provide a safe and convenient transportation solution for the public, but the complex and various environments in the real world make it difficult to operate safely and reliably. A connected autonomous vehicle (CAV) is an AV with vehicle connectivity capability, which enhances the situational awareness of the AV and enables the cooperation between AVs. Hence, CAV technology can enhance the capabilities and robustness of AV to be a promising transportation solution in the future. This paper introduces a representative architecture of CAVs and surveys the latest research advances, methods, and algorithms for sensing, perception, planning, and control of CAVs. It reviews the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice (when applicable) of a multi-layer Perception-Planning-Control architecture including on-board sensors and vehicular communications, the methods of sensor fusion and localization and mapping in the perception layer, the algorithms of decision making and trajectory planning in the planning layer, and the control strategies of trajectory tracking in the control layer. Furthermore, the implementations and impact of vehicle connectivity and the corresponding consequential challenges of cooperative perception, complex connected decision making, and multi-vehicle controls are summarized and their significant research issues enumerated. Most importantly, the critical review in this paper provides a list and discussion of the remaining challenges and unsolved problems of CAVs in each Section which would be helpful to researchers in the field. The comprehensive coverage of this paper makes it particularly useful to academic researchers, practitioners, and students alike.

Research Advances and Challenges of Autonomous and Connected Ground Vehicles

Pursuit-evasion games in the presence of obstacles

A hierarchical game theoretic decision making framework is exploited to model driver decisions and interactions in traffic. In this paper, we apply this framework to develop a simulator to evaluate various existing autonomous driving algorithms. Specifically, two algorithms, based on Stackelberg policies and decision trees, are quantitatively compared in a traffic scenario where all the human-driven vehicles are modeled using the presented game theoretic approach.

/pdf/hierarchical-reasoning-game-theory-based-approach-for-kr15ywvr3x.pdf

Hierarchical reasoning game theory based approach for evaluation and testing of autonomous vehicle control systems

Autonomous driving has been the subject of increased interest in recent years both in industry and in academia. Serious efforts are being pursued to address legal, technical and logistical problems and make autonomous cars a viable option for everyday transportation. One significant challenge is the time and effort required for the verification and validation of the decision and control algorithms employed in these vehicles to ensure a safe and comfortable driving experience. Hundreds of thousands of miles of driving tests are required to achieve a well calibrated control system that is capable of operating an autonomous vehicle in an uncertain traffic environment where multiple interactions between vehicles and drivers simultaneously occur. Traffic simulators where these interactions can be modeled and represented with reasonable fidelity can help decrease the time and effort necessary for the development of the autonomous driving control algorithms by providing a venue where acceptable initial control calibrations can be achieved quickly and safely before actual road tests. In this paper, we present a game theoretic traffic model that can be used to 1) test and compare various autonomous vehicle decision and control systems and 2) calibrate the parameters of an existing control system. We demonstrate two example case studies, where, in the first case, we test and quantitatively compare two autonomous vehicle control systems in terms of their safety and performance, and, in the second case, we optimize the parameters of an autonomous vehicle control system, utilizing the proposed traffic model and simulation environment.

Game-Theoretic Modeling of Driver and Vehicle Interactions for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Vehicle Control Systems

This paper describes a game theoretical model of traffic where multiple drivers interact with each other. The model is developed using hierarchical reasoning, a game theoretical model of human behavior, and reinforcement learning. It is assumed that the drivers can observe only a partial state of the traffic they are in and therefore although the environment satisfies the Markov property, it appears as non-Markovian to the drivers. Hence, each driver implicitly has to find a policy, i.e. a mapping from observations to actions, for a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. In this paper, a computationally tractable solution to this problem is provided by employing hierarchical reasoning together with a suitable reinforcement learning algorithm. Simulation results are reported, which demonstrate that the resulting driver models provide reasonable behavior for the given traffic scenarios.

/pdf/a-game-theoretical-model-of-traffic-with-multiple-5ccbyq7f55.pdf

Dave W. Oyler

Papers

Game Theoretic Modeling of Driver and Vehicle Interactions for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Vehicle Control Systems

Pursuit-evasion games in the presence of obstacles

Hierarchical reasoning game theory based approach for evaluation and testing of autonomous vehicle control systems

Game-Theoretic Modeling of Driver and Vehicle Interactions for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Vehicle Control Systems

A game theoretical model of traffic with multiple interacting drivers for use in autonomous vehicle development