Autonomous Vehicle Social Behavior for Highway Entrance Ramp
Management
Junqing Wei, John M. Dolan and Bakhtiar Litkouhi
Abstract— “Socially cooperative driving” is an integral part
of our everyday driving, hence requiring special attention to
imbue the autonomous driving with a more natural driving
behavior. In this paper, an intention-integrated Prediction- and
Cost function-Based algorithm (iPCB) framework is proposed
to enable an autonomous vehicle to perform cooperative social
behavior. An intention estimator is developed to extract the
probability of surrounding agents’ intentions in real time. Then
for each candidate strategy, a prediction engine considering
the interaction between host and surrounding agents is used
to predict future scenarios. A cost function-based evaluation
is applied to compute the cost for each scenario and select
the decision corresponding to the lowest cost. The algorithm
was tested in simulation on an autonomous vehicle cooperating
with vehicles merging from freeway entrance ramps with 10,000
randomly generated scenarios . Compared with approaches that
do not take social behavior into account, the iPCB algorithm
shows a 41.7% performance improvement based on the chosen
cost functions.
I. INTRODUCTION
The availability of rapid freeway and highway transporta-
tion has strongly contributed to society’s progress over the
last century. However, in recent decades, traffic congestion
on road networks has become a bottleneck for the further
development of cities. Autonomous vehicles have shown the
potential to lessen this problem by reducing the number of
traffic accidents and enhancing the capacity and efficiency
of the transportation system. Since the 1980s, autonomous
vehicle intelligence has increased from lane centering to ac-
tually driving on public roads with lane-changing capability.
Nevertheless, in the short term, human-driven vehicles will
continue to predominate. For human drivers, an intuitive
form of cooperation occurs when another vehicle is nearby,
consisting in an estimate of the other driver’s intention and
a corresponding reaction. Without this ability, in scenarios
such as entrance ramps, it is hard for an autonomous robot
to behave in what might be termed a socially acceptable way.
This will make it difficult for human drivers to understand,
predict and cooperate with autonomous vehicles, and may
lead to dangerous situations.
Therefore, to enhance autonomous driving in the real
world, the decision-making system will benefit from the
This work was supported by General Motors through the GM-Carnegie
Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Laboratory.
Junqing Wei is with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
junqingw@cmu.edu
John M. Dolan is with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
PA 15213, USA
Bakhtiar Litkouhi is with General Motor R&D, Warren, MI 48091, USA
ability to socially cooperate with human-driven vehicles.
In this paper, the importance of social cooperation in the
specific instance of dealing with cars merging from entrance
ramps is shown. A novel social behavior framework is
implemented to exhibit the needed social behavior for this
driving scenario.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Autonomous Driving Systems
Beginning in the late 1980s, a few experimental plat-
forms capable of lane centering and cruise control-level
autonomous driving on highways were developed [1], [2]. In
2004-2007, the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Chal-
lenge provided researchers a practical testing environment
to test the latest sensors, computing technology and artificial
intelligence algorithms for autonomous driving [3], [4]. In
the competition, the autonomous vehicles were able to deal
with relatively light human traffic driven by trained compe-
tition crews in a closed test field. In 2011, Google released
its autonomous driving platforms [5]. The vehicles have
each completed over 10,000 miles of autonomous driving
on multiple road types and under various traffic conditions.
The Google car is capable of dealing with a number of real-
world human-driven traffic on public roads. However, these
vehicles will not perform as well as human drivers in heavy
traffic due to their limited ability to understand and cooperate
with surrounding cars as human drivers do with each other.
B. Adaptive Cruise Control
Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is one of the most widely
deployed advanced driver assist systems [6]. In recent years,
lane centering assist has also been developed to enhance
human driving comfort and safety on freeways [7]. By
integrating these driver assistant systems, a few prototype au-
tonomous driving platforms have been demonstrated by auto
manufacturers. Though these commercially viable platforms
demonstrate the potential to improve driver’s experience
and safety, they are mostly capable of limited single-lane
highway autonomy. Little effort has been put into cooperative
behavior between the single-lane autonomous driving system
and surrounding traffic in adjacent lanes.
C. Human Driver Model
Experienced human drivers can, for the most part, under-
stand each other’s intentions and smoothly cooperate with
one another while driving. Therefore, it is reasonable to uti-
lize a human driver behavior model to control an autonomous
vehicle. In the microscopic traffic simulations area, there
2013 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)
June 23-26, 2013, Gold Coast, Australia
978-1-4673-2754-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 201
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