Human-Like Decision Making for Autonomous Driving: A Noncooperative Game Theoretic Approach

• Published in: IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems Vol. 22; no. 4; pp. 2076 - 2087
• Main Authors: Hang, Peng, Lv, Chen, Xing, Yang, Huang, Chao, Hu, Zhongxu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: autonomous vehicle; Decision making; Decision theory; driver model; Ecological effects; Game theory; Games; human-like; Lane changing; model predictive control; Nash equilibrium; Passenger comfort; Planning; Potential fields; Predictive control; Predictive models; Safety; Social factors; Vehicle safety; Vehicles
• ISSN: 1524-9050; 1558-0016
• DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2020.3036984

Considering that human-driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will coexist on roads in the future for a long time, how to merge AVs into human drivers' traffic ecology and minimize the effect of AVs and their misfit with human drivers, are issues worthy of consideration. Moreover, different passengers have different needs for AVs, thus, how to provide personalized choices for different passengers is another issue for AVs. Therefore, a human-like decision making framework is designed for AVs in this paper. Different driving styles and social interaction characteristics are formulated for AVs regarding driving safety, ride comfort and travel efficiency, which are considered in the modeling process of decision making. Then, Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg game theory are applied to the noncooperative decision making. In addition, potential field method and model predictive control (MPC) are combined to deal with the motion prediction and planning for AVs, which provides predicted motion information for the decision-making module. Finally, two typical testing scenarios of lane change, i.e., merging and overtaking, are carried out to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed decision-making framework considering different human-like behaviors. Testing results indicate that both the two game theoretic approaches can provide reasonable human-like decision making for AVs. Compared with the Nash equilibrium approach, under the normal driving style, the cost value of decision making using the Stackelberg game theoretic approach is reduced by over 20%.