Characterizing Cultural Differences in Naturalistic Driving Interactions

The characterization of driver interactions is important for a variety of problems associated with the design of autonomy for vehicles. We consider the role of cultural context in driver interactions, by evaluating the differences in driving interactions in simulated driving experiments conducted in New York City, New York, USA, and in Haifa, Israel. The same experiment was conducted in both locations, and focused on naturalistic driving interactions at unsigned intersections, in which interaction with another vehicle was required for safe navigation through the intersection. We employ conditional distribution embeddings, a nonparametric machine learning technique, to empirically characterize differences in the distribution of trajectories that characterize driver interactions, across both locations. We show that cultural variability outweighs individual variability in intersections that require turning ma-neuvers, and that clear distinctions amongst driving strategies are evident between populations. Our approach facilities a data-driven analysis that is amenable to rigorous statistical testing, in a manner that minimizes filtering, pre-processing, and other manipulations that could inadvertently bias the data and obscure important findings.