A Hybrid Rule-Based and Data-Driven Approach to Driver Modeling Through Particle Filtering

Autonomous vehicles need to model the behavior of surrounding human driven vehicles to be safe and efficient traffic participants. Existing approaches to modeling human driving behavior have relied on both data-driven and rule-based methods. While data-driven models are more expressive, rule-based models are interpretable, which is an important requirement for safety-critical domains like driving. However, rule-based models are not sufficiently representative of data, and data-driven models are yet unable to generate realistic traffic simulation due to unrealistic driving behavior such as collisions. In this paper, we propose a methodology that combines rule-based modeling with data-driven learning. While the rules are governed by interpretable parameters of the driver model, these parameters are learned online from driving demonstration data using particle filtering. We perform driver modeling experiments on the task of highway driving and merging using data from three real-world driving demonstration datasets. Our results show that driver models based on our hybrid rule-based and data-driven approach can accurately capture real-world driving behavior. Further, we assess the realism of the driving behavior generated by our model by having humans perform a “driving Turing test,” where they are asked to distinguish between videos of real driving and those generated using our driver models.