Personalized Car Following for Autonomous Driving with Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Driving automation is gradually replacing human driving maneuvers in different applications such as adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. However, contemporary driving automation applications based on expert systems or prede-fined control strategies are not in line with individual human driver's preference. To overcome this problem, we propose a Personalized Adaptive Cruise Control (P-ACC) system that can learn the driver's car-following preferences from historical data using model-based maximum entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Once activated in real-time, the P-ACC system first classifies the driver type and the weather type (at that moment). The vehicle is then controlled using the pre-trained IRL model on the cloud of the associated class. The personalized IRL model on the cloud will be updated as more human driving data is collected from various scenarios. Numerical simulation with real-world naturalistic driving data shows that, the accuracy of reproducing the real-world driving profile improves up to 30.1% in terms of speed and 36.5% in terms of distance gap, when P-ACC is compared with the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM). Game engine-based human-in-the-loop simulation demonstrates that, the takeover frequency of the driver during the usage of P-ACC decreases up to 93.4%, compared with that during the usage of IDM-based ACC.