Human Inspired Autonomous Intersection Handling Using Game Theory

Left turning for autonomous vehicles at intersections is challenging due to the various driving behaviors from different human drivers and the strong interaction between the autonomous vehicle and human traffic participants. This paper proposes a planning and decision making framework for intersection left-turning which considers the interaction between autonomous vehicles and human drivers as well as pedestrians to address this issue. The proposed framework considers interactions mathematically by formulating the problem as a linear quadratic differential game. Through solving the Nash equilibrium of the game, the autonomous vehicle is able to properly interact with surrounding traffic participants. Under the differential game framework, the accuracy of the interaction formulation is closely related to the behavior model of human drivers. Therefore, real-world human behavior is extracted and evaluated from naturalistic driving dataset to help establish more realistic modeling and estimation of various kinds of traffic participants, including aggressive, neutral and conservative traffic participants. The simulation results show that the autonomous vehicle is able to properly estimate the types of traffic participants by observing their behavior using the proposed technique. Then the autonomous vehicle behave according to the types of those traffic participants to enable interactive and human-like planning and decision making at intersections.