Interaction-Aware Planning With Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Human-Like Autonomous Driving in Merge Scenarios

Merge scenarios on highway are often challenging for autonomous driving, due to its lack of sufficient tacit understanding on and subtle interaction with human drivers in the traffic flow. This, as a result, may impose serious safety risks, and often cause traffic jam with autonomous driving. Therefore, human-like autonomous driving becomes important, yet imperative. This article presents an interaction-aware decision-making and planning method for human-like autonomous driving in merge scenarios. Rather than directly mimicking human behavior, deep inverse reinforcement learning is employed to learn the human-used reward function for decision-making and planning from naturalistic driving data to enhance interpretability and generalizability. To consider the interaction factor, the reward function for planning is utilized to evaluate the joint trajectories of the autonomous driving vehicle (ADV) and traffic vehicles. In contrast to predicting trajectories of traffic vehicles with the fixed trajectory of ADV given by the upstream prediction model, the trajectories of traffic vehicles are predicted by responding to the ADV's behavior in this article. Additionally, the decision-making module is employed to reduce the solution space of planning via the selection of a proper gap for merging. Both the decision-making and planning algorithms follow a “sampling, evaluation, and selection” framework. After being verified through experiments, the results indicate that the planned trajectories with the presented method are highly similar to those of human drivers. Moreover, compared to the interaction-unaware planning method, the interaction-aware planning method behaves closer to human drivers.