A Hierarchical Vehicle Behavior Prediction Framework With Traffic Signals and Interactive Agents

Vehicle behavior prediction in complex urban scenarios with traffic signals and interactive agents is an important yet complicated task for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this work, a hierarchical vehicle behavior prediction framework is proposed to incorporate the traffic signal information and model the interaction between vehicles. The framework predicts vehicle behaviors in two stages, discrete intention prediction and continuous trajectory prediction. In the discrete intention prediction stage, Bayesian network is adopted to provide a high-level behavior prediction of the principle other vehicle. The discrete prediction results are forwarded to the second stage, where a continuous trajectory is predicted with maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning and potential game. The framework is designed to be able to capture the difference among human drivers with parameterized driver characteristics. The proposed predictor is validated in two scenarios: the yellow light running scenario and the right-turn scenario. The trajectory prediction average displacement error of the yellow light running scenario is 0.695m for a 3-second prediction interval, and the prediction accuracy of the right-turn vehicle in the right-turn scenario is 0.51m for a 2-second prediction interval.