Risk-aware motion planning for automated vehicle among human-driven cars

Abstract

We consider the maneuver planning problem for automated vehicles when they share the road with human-driven cars and interact with each other using a finite set of maneuvers. Each maneuver is calculated considering input constraints, actuator disturbances and sensor noise, so that we can use a maneuver automaton to perform higher-level planning that is robust against lower-level effects. In order to model the behavior of human-driven cars in response to the intent of the automated vehicle, we use control improvisation to build a probabilistic model. To accommodate for potential mismatches between the learned human model and human driving behaviors, we use a conditional value-at-risk objective function to obtain the optimal policy for the automated vehicle. We demonstrate through simulations that our motion planning framework consisting of an interactive human driving model and risk-aware motion planning strategy makes it possible to adapt to different traffic conditions and confidence levels.