On Social Interactions of Merging Behaviors at Highway On-Ramps in Congested Traffic

08/14/2020
by   Huanjie Wang, et al.
0

Merging at highway on-ramps while interacting with other human-driven vehicles is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs). An efficient route to this challenge requires exploring and then exploiting knowledge of the interaction process from demonstrations by humans. However, it is unclear what information (or the environment states) is utilized by the human driver to guide their behavior over the whole merging process. This paper provides quantitative analysis and evaluation of the merging behavior at highway on-ramps with congested traffic in a volume of time and space. Two types of social interaction scenarios are considered based on the social preferences of surrounding vehicles: courteous and rude. The significant levels of environment states for characterizing the interactive merging process are empirically analyzed based on the real-world INTERACTION dataset. Experimental results reveal two fundamental mechanisms in the merging process: 1) Human driver selects different states to make sequential decisions at different moments of task execution and 2) the social preference of surrounding vehicles has an impact on variable selection for making decisions. It implies that for autonomous driving, efficient decision-making design should filter out irrelevant information while considering the social preference of the surrounding vehicles, to reach a comparable human-level performance. These essential findings shed light on developing new decision-making approaches for AVs.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 3

page 5

page 8

page 11

research
02/15/2021

Uncovering Interpretable Internal States of Merging Tasks at Highway On-Ramps for Autonomous Driving Decision-Making

Humans make daily-routine decisions based on their internal states in in...
research
05/22/2020

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

Considering that human-driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles (AVs) wil...
research
04/01/2023

Connected and Automated Vehicles in Mixed-Traffic: Learning Human Driver Behavior for Effective On-Ramp Merging

Highway merging scenarios featuring mixed traffic conditions pose signif...
research
04/13/2023

A model of communication-enabled traffic interactions

A major challenge for autonomous vehicles is handling interactive scenar...
research
08/09/2023

Merging in a Coupled Driving Simulator: How do drivers resolve conflicts?

Traffic interactions between merging and highway vehicles are a major to...
research
05/05/2021

Calibration of Human Driving Behavior and Preference Using Naturalistic Traffic Data

Understanding human driving behaviors quantitatively is critical even in...
research
07/14/2017

Freeway Merging in Congested Traffic based on Multipolicy Decision Making with Passive Actor Critic

Freeway merging in congested traffic is a significant challenge toward f...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset