A Reinforcement Learning based Decision-making System with Aggressive Driving Behavior Consideration for Autonomous Vehicles

With the fast development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology and possible popularity of AVs in the near future, a mixed-vehicle type driving environment where both AVs and their surrounding human-driving vehicles drive on the same road will exist and last for a long time. An AV measures its driving environments in real time and make control decisions to ensure driving safety. However, surrounding human-driving vehicles may conduct aggressive driving behaviors (e.g., sudden deceleration, sudden acceleration, sudden left or right lane change) in practice, which requires an AV to make correct control decisions to eliminate the effect of aggressive driving behaviors on its driving safety. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based decision-making system (ReDS) which considers aggressive driving behaviors of surrounding human-driving vehicles during the decision making process. In ReDS, we firstly build a mixture density network based aggressive driving behavior detection method to detect possible aggressive driving behaviors among surrounding vehicles of an AV. We then build a reward function based on aggressive driving behavior detection results and incorporate the reward function into a reinforcement learning model to make optimal control decisions considering aggressive driving behaviors. We use a real-world traffic dataset from the United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration to evaluate optimal control decision determination performance of ReDS in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. The comparison results show that ReDS can improve optimal control decision success rate by 43% compared with existing methods, which demonstrates that ReDS has good optimal control decision determination performance.