Continuous Decision Making for On-road Autonomous Driving under Uncertain and Interactive Environments

Although autonomous driving techniques have achieved great improvements, challenges still exist in decision making for variety of different scenarios under uncertain and interactive environments. A good decision maker must satisfy the following requirements: (1) Be in a generic and unified form to cover as more scenarios as possible. (2) Be able to interact properly with other moving obstacles under the uncertainty of their motions. In this paper, the continuous decision making (CDM) framework is proposed to formulate different driving scenarios in a unified way, which encodes the high level decision making information into a continuous reference trajectory that can be naturally combined with a lower level trajectory planner. Within the framework, a maximum interaction defensive policy (MIDP) is proposed, which calculates the best action to interact with stochastic moving obstacles while guaranteeing safety. The method is applied to a ramp merging scenario and the stochastic behavior models of the surrounding vehicles are learned from the NGSIM dataset. Simulations are shown to visualize and analyze the results.