Evolutionary Decision-Making and Planning for Autonomous Driving Based on Safe and Rational Exploration and Exploitation

Decision-making and motion planning are extremely important in autonomous driving to ensure safe driving in a real-world environment.This study proposes an online evolutionary decision-making and motion planning framework for autonomous driving based on a hybrid data-and model-driven method.First,a data-driven decision-making module based on deep reinforcement learning(DRL)is developed to pursue a rational driving performance as much as possible.Then,model predictive control(MPC)is employed to execute both longitudinal and lateral motion planning tasks.Multiple constraints are defined according to the vehicle’s physical limit to meet the driving task requirements.Finally,two principles of safety and rationality for the self-evolution of autonomous driving are proposed.A motion envelope is established and embedded into a rational exploration and exploitation scheme,which filters out unreasonable experiences by masking unsafe actions so as to collect high-quality training data for the DRL agent.Experiments with a high-fidelity vehicle model and MATLAB/Simulink co-simulation environment are conducted,and the results show that the proposed online-evolution framework is able to generate safer,more rational,and more efficient driving action in a real-world environment.

Toward Trustworthy Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles:A Robust Reinforcement Learning Approach with Safety Guarantees

While autonomous vehicles are vital components of intelligent transportation systems,ensuring the trustworthiness of decision-making remains a substantial challenge in realizing autonomous driving.Therefore,we present a novel robust reinforcement learning approach with safety guarantees to attain trustworthy decision-making for autonomous vehicles.The proposed technique ensures decision trustworthiness in terms of policy robustness and collision safety.Specifically,an adversary model is learned online to simulate the worst-case uncertainty by approximating the optimal adversarial perturbations on the observed states and environmental dynamics.In addition,an adversarial robust actor-critic algorithm is developed to enable the agent to learn robust policies against perturbations in observations and dynamics.Moreover,we devise a safety mask to guarantee the collision safety of the autonomous driving agent during both the training and testing processes using an interpretable knowledge model known as the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety Model.Finally,the proposed approach is evaluated through both simulations and experiments.These results indicate that the autonomous driving agent can make trustworthy decisions and drastically reduce the number of collisions through robust safety policies.

AUTONOMOUS AGENT FRAMEWORK AND ITS DECISION-MAKING

Autonomy, a key property associated with the agent, is an important topic in the current research of the agent theory. Although no definition of the agent autonomy is universally accepted, an important aspect of the agent autonomy is the decision-making capability of the agents. This paper investigates the autonomy of the agent, presents a framework for autonomous agent and discusses its decision-making process. Started with introducing a language for representing autonomous agent, a framework is proposed for modeling autonomous agent based on a BDI model and the situation calculus. Finally, a kind of decision-making process of the autonomous agent is presented.

Planning and Decision-making for Connected Autonomous Vehicles at Road Intersections:A Review

Planning and decision-making technology at intersections is a comprehensive research problem in intelligent transportation systems due to the uncertainties caused by a variety of traffic participants.As wireless communication advances,vehicle infrastructure integrated algorithms designed for intersection planning and decision-making have received increasing attention.In this paper,the recent studies on the planning and decision-making technologies at intersections are primarily overviewed.The general planning and decision-making approaches are presented,which include graph-based approach,prediction base approach,optimization-based approach and machine learning based approach.Since connected autonomous vehicles(CAVs)is the future direction for the automated driving area,we summarized the evolving planning and decision-making methods based on vehicle infrastructure cooperative technologies.Both four-way signalized and unsignalized intersection(s)are investigated under purely automated driving traffic and mixed traffic.The study benefit from current strategies,protocols,and simulation tools to help researchers identify the presented approaches’challenges and determine the research gaps,and several remaining possible research problems that need to be solved in the future.

Probabilistic Lane-Change Decision-Making and Planning for Autonomous Heavy Vehicles

To improve the safety and driving stability of the autonomous heavy truck, it is necessary to consider the differences of driving behavior and drivable trajectories between the heavy trucks and passenger cars. This study proposes a probabilistic decision-making and trajectory planning framework for the autonomous heavy trucks. Firstly, the driving decision process is divided into intention generation and feasibility evaluations, which are realized using the utility theory and risk assessment, respectively. Subsequently the driving decision is made and sent to the trajectory planning module. In order to reflect the greater risks of the truck to other surrounding vehicles, the aggressiveness index(AI) is proposed and quantified to infer the asymmetrical risk level of lane-change maneuver. In the planning stage, the lateral and roll dynamics stability domains are developed as the constraints to exclude the candidate trajectories that would cause vehicle instability. Finally, the simulation results are compared between the proposed model and the artificial potential filed model in the scenarios extracted from the naturalistic driving data. It is shown that the proposed framework can provide the human-like lane-change decisions and truck-friendly trajectories, and performs well in dynamic driving environments.

Driving decision-making analysis of car-following for autonomous vehicle under complex urban environment

The decision-making under complex urban environment become one of the key issues that restricts the rapid development of the autonomous vehicles. The difficulty in making timely and accurate decisions like human beings under highly dynamic traffic environment is a major challenge for autonomous driving. Car-following has been regarded as the simplest but essential driving behavior among driving tasks and has received extensive attention from researchers around the world. This work addresses this problem and proposes a novel method RSAN(rough-set artificial neural network) to learn the decisions from excellent human drivers. A virtual urban traffic environment was built by Pre Scan and driving simulation was conducted to obtain a broad set of relevant data such as experienced drivers' behavior data and surrounding vehicles' motion data. Then, rough set was used to preprocess these data to extract the key influential factors on decision and reduce the impact of uncertain data and noise data. And the car-following decision was learned by neural network in which key factor was the input and acceleration was the output. The result shows the better convergence speed and the better decision accuracy of RSAN than ANN. Findings of this work contributes to the empirical understanding of driver's decision-making process and it provides a theoretical basis for the study of car-following decision-making under complex and dynamic environment.

Human-Like Decision-Making of Autonomous Vehicles in Dynamic Traffic Scenarios

With the maturation of autonomous driving technology, the use of autonomous vehicles in a socially acceptable manner has become a growing demand of the public. Human-like autonomous driving is expected due to the impact of the differences between autonomous vehicles and human drivers on safety.Although human-like decision-making has become a research hotspot, a unified theory has not yet been formed, and there are significant differences in the implementation and performance of existing methods. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of human-like decision-making for autonomous vehicles. The following issues are discussed: 1) The intelligence level of most autonomous driving decision-making algorithms;2) The driving datasets and simulation platforms for testing and verifying human-like decision-making;3) The evaluation metrics of human-likeness;personalized driving;the application of decisionmaking in real traffic scenarios;and 4) The potential research direction of human-like driving. These research results are significant for creating interpretable human-like driving models and applying them in dynamic traffic scenarios. In the future, the combination of intuitive logical reasoning and hierarchical structure will be an important topic for further research. It is expected to meet the needs of human-like driving.

Modeling and TOPSIS-GRA Algorithm for Autonomous Driving Decision-Making Under 5G-V2X Infrastructure

This paper is to explore the problems of intelligent connected vehicles(ICVs)autonomous driving decision-making under a 5G-V2X structured road environment.Through literature review and interviews with autonomous driving practitioners,this paper firstly puts forward a logical framework for designing a cerebrum-like autonomous driving system.Secondly,situated on this framework,it builds a hierarchical finite state machine(HFSM)model as well as a TOPSIS-GRA algorithm for making ICV autonomous driving decisions by employing a data fusion approach between the entropy weight method(EWM)and analytic hierarchy process method(AHP)and by employing a model fusion approach between the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution(TOPSIS)and grey relational analysis(GRA).The HFSM model is composed of two layers:the global FSM model and the local FSM model.The decision of the former acts as partial input information of the latter and the result of the latter is sent forward to the local pathplanning module,meanwhile pulsating feedback to the former as real-time refresh data.To identify different traffic scenarios in a cerebrum-like way,the global FSM model is designed as 7 driving behavior states and 17 driving characteristic events,and the local FSM model is designed as 16 states and 8 characteristic events.In respect to designing a cerebrum-like algorithm for state transition,this paper firstly fuses AHP weight and EWM weight at their output layer to generate a synthetic weight coefficient for each characteristic event;then,it further fuses TOPSIS method and GRA method at the model building layer to obtain the implementable order of state transition.To verify the feasibility,reliability,and safety of theHFSMmodel aswell as its TOPSISGRA state transition algorithm,this paper elaborates on a series of simulative experiments conducted on the PreScan8.50 platform.The results display that the accuracy of obstacle detection gets 98%,lane line prediction is beyond 70 m,the speed of collision avoidance is higher than 45 km/h,the distance of collision avoidance is less than 5 m,path planning time for obstacle avoidance is averagely less than 50 ms,and brake deceleration is controlled under 6 m/s2.These technical indexes support that the driving states set and characteristic events set for the HFSM model as well as its TOPSIS-GRA algorithm may bring about cerebrum-like decision-making effectiveness for ICV autonomous driving under 5G-V2X intelligent road infrastructure.

UAV maneuvering decision-making algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning under the guidance of expert experience

Autonomous umanned aerial vehicle(UAV) manipulation is necessary for the defense department to execute tactical missions given by commanders in the future unmanned battlefield. A large amount of research has been devoted to improving the autonomous decision-making ability of UAV in an interactive environment, where finding the optimal maneuvering decisionmaking policy became one of the key issues for enabling the intelligence of UAV. In this paper, we propose a maneuvering decision-making algorithm for autonomous air-delivery based on deep reinforcement learning under the guidance of expert experience. Specifically, we refine the guidance towards area and guidance towards specific point tasks for the air-delivery process based on the traditional air-to-surface fire control methods.Moreover, we construct the UAV maneuvering decision-making model based on Markov decision processes(MDPs). Specifically, we present a reward shaping method for the guidance towards area and guidance towards specific point tasks using potential-based function and expert-guided advice. The proposed algorithm could accelerate the convergence of the maneuvering decision-making policy and increase the stability of the policy in terms of the output during the later stage of training process. The effectiveness of the proposed maneuvering decision-making policy is illustrated by the curves of training parameters and extensive experimental results for testing the trained policy.

Cooperative Decision-Making for Multiple UAVs Autonomous Confrontation

This paper presents a rule-based framework for addressing decision-making problems within the context of the "UI-STRIVE"Competition.First,two distinct autonomous confrontation scenarios are described:autonomous air combat and cooperative interception.Second,a State-Event-Condition-Action(SECA)decision-making framework is developed,which integrates thefinite state machine and event-condition-action frameworks.This framework provides three products to describe rules,i.e.the SECA model,the SECA state chart,and the SECA rule description.Third,the situation assessment and target assignment during autonomous air combat are investigated,and the mathematical models are established.Finally,the decisionmaking model's rationality and feasibility are verified through data simulation and analysis.

An actor-critic based learning method for decision-making and planning of autonomous vehicles

In order to improve the agility and applicability of trajectory planning algorithm for autonomous vehicles, this paper proposes a novel actor-critic based learning method for decision-making and planning in multi-vehicle complex traffic. It is the coupling planning of vehicle’s path and speed thus to make the trajectory more flexible. First, generations from the decided action to the planned trajectory are described by the end-point of the trajectory. Then, the actor-critic based learning method is built to learn an optimal policy for the decision process. It can update the policy by the gradient of the current policy’s advantage. In this process,features of the real traffic are carefully extracted by time headway(TH) and speed distribution. Reward function is built by the safety, efficiency and driving comfort. Furthermore, to make the policy network have better convergency, the policy network is modularized in two parts: the lane-changing network and the lane-keeping network, which decide the optimal end-point of the path and speed candidates respectively. Finally, the curved overtaking scenario and the interaction process with human driver are conducted to illustrate the feasibility and superiority. The results show that the proposed method has better real-time performance and can make the planned coupling trajectory more continuous and smoother than the existing rule-based method.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Enabled Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving at Intersections

Road intersection is one of the most complex and accident-prone traffic scenarios,so it’s challenging for autonomous vehicles(AVs)to make safe and efficient decisions at the intersections.Most of the related studies focus on the solution to a single scenario or only guarantee safety without considering driving efficiency.To address these problems,this study proposed a deep reinforcement learning enabled decision-making framework for AVs to drive through intersections automatically,safely and efficiently.The mapping relationship between traffic images and vehicle operations was obtained by an end-to-end decision-making framework established by convolutional neural networks.Traffic images collected at two timesteps were used to calculate the relative velocity between vehicles.Markov decision process was employed to model the interaction between AVs and other vehicles,and the deep Q-network algorithm was utilized to obtain the optimal driving policy regarding safety and efficiency.To verify the effectiveness of the proposed decision-making framework,the top three accident-prone crossing path crash scenarios at intersections were simulated,when different initial vehicle states were adopted for better generalization capability.The results showed that the developed method could make AVs drive safely and efficiently through intersections in all of the tested scenarios.

Safe Efficient Policy Optimization Algorithm for Unsignalized Intersection Navigation

Unsignalized intersections pose a challenge for autonomous vehicles that must decide how to navigate them safely and efficiently.This paper proposes a reinforcement learning(RL)method for autonomous vehicles to navigate unsignalized intersections safely and efficiently.The method uses a semantic scene representation to handle variable numbers of vehicles and a universal reward function to facilitate stable learning.A collision risk function is designed to penalize unsafe actions and guide the agent to avoid them.A scalable policy optimization algorithm is introduced to improve data efficiency and safety for vehicle learning at intersections.The algorithm employs experience replay to overcome the on-policy limitation of proximal policy optimization and incorporates the collision risk constraint into the policy optimization problem.The proposed safe RL algorithm can balance the trade-off between vehicle traffic safety and policy learning efficiency.Simulated intersection scenarios with different traffic situations are used to test the algorithm and demonstrate its high success rates and low collision rates under different traffic conditions.The algorithm shows the potential of RL for enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems at unsignalized intersections.

A New Generation of Rules-based Approach:Mivar-based Intelligent Planning of Robot Actions(MIPRA)and Brains for Autonomous Robots

To create autonomous robots,both hardware and software are needed.If enormous progress has already been made in the field of equipment,then robot software depends on the development of artificial intelligence.This article proposes a solution for creating“logical”brains for autonomous robots,namely,an approach for creating an intelligent robot action planner based on Mivar expert systems.The application of this approach provides opportunities to reduce the computational complexity of solving planning problems and the requirements for the computational characteristics of hardware platforms on which intelligent planning systems are deployed.To theoretically and practically justify the expediency of using logically solving systems,in particular Mivar expert systems,to create intelligent planners,the MIPRA(Mivar-based Intelligent Planning of Robot Actions)planner was created to solve problems such as STRIPS for permutation cubes in the Blocks World domain.The planner is based on the platform for creating expert systems of the Razumator.As a result,the Mivar planner can process information about the state of the subject area based on the analysis of cause-effect relationships and an algorithm for automatically constructing logical inference(finding a solution from“Given”to“Find”).Moreover,an important feature of the MIPRA is that the system is built on the principles of a“white box”,due to which the system can explain any of its decisions and provide justification for the actions performed in the form of a retrospective of the stages of the decision-making process.When preparing a set of robot actions aimed at changing control objects,expert knowledge is used,which is the basis for the functioning algorithms of the planner.This approach makes it possible to include an expert in the process of organizing the work of the intelligent planner and use existing knowledge about the subject area.Practical experiments of this study have shown that instead of many hours and powerful multiprocessor servers,the MIPRA on a personal computer solves the planning problems with the following number of cubes:10 cubes can be rearranged in 0.028 seconds,100 cubes in 0.938 seconds,and 1000 cubes in 84.188 seconds.The results of this study can be used to reduce the computational complexity of solving tasks of planning the actions of robots,as well as their groups,multilevel heterogeneous robotic systems,and cyber-physical systems of various bases and purposes.

A self-driving solution for resource-constrained autonomous vehicles in parked areas

Autonomous vehicles in industrial parks can provide intelligent,efficient,and environmentally friendly transportation services,making them crucial tools for solving internal transportation issues.Considering the characteristics of industrial park scenarios and limited resources,designing and implementing autonomous driving solutions for autonomous vehicles in these areas has become a research hotspot.This paper proposes an efficient autonomous driving solution based on path planning,target recognition,and driving decision-making as its core components.Detailed designs for path planning,lane positioning,driving decision-making,and anti-collision algorithms are presented.Performance analysis and experimental validation of the proposed solution demonstrate its effectiveness in meeting the autonomous driving needs within resource-constrained environments in industrial parks.This solution provides important references for enhancing the performance of autonomous vehicles in these areas.

Intelligent decision-making method for vehicles in emergency conditions based on artificial potential fields and finite state machines

This study aims to propose a decision-making method based on artificial potential fields(APFs)and finite state machines(FSMs)in emergency conditions.This study presents a decision-making method based on APFs and FSMs for emergency conditions.By modeling the longitudinal and lateral potential energy fields of the vehicle,the driving state is identified,and the trigger conditions are provided for path planning during lane changing.In addition,this study also designed the state transition rules based on the longitudinal and lateral virtual forces.It established the vehicle decision-making model based on the finite state machine to ensure driving safety in emergency situations.To illustrate the performance of the decision-making model by considering APFs and finite state machines.The version of the model in the co-simulation platform of MATLAB and CarSim shows that the developed decision model in this study accurately generates driving behaviors of the vehicle at different time intervals.The contributions of this study are two-fold.A hierarchical vehicle state machine decision model is proposed to enhance driving safety in emergency scenarios.Mathematical models for determining the transition thresholds of lateral and longitudinal vehicle states are established based on the vehicle potential field model,leading to the formulation of transition rules between different states of autonomous vehicles(AVs).

稀疏奖励下多航天器规避决策自学习仿真

为了提高航天器编队对多拦截器规避能力,针对传统程序式机动规避成功率低的问题,提出一种基于深度强化学习的多智能体协同自主规避决策方法。其中基于Actor-Critic架构设计了一种多智能体强化学习算法,为解决该自学习算法信度分配问题,提出加权线性拟合方法;对于任务场景稀疏奖励问题,提出基于逆值法的稀疏奖励强化学习方法。根据规避任务决策过程建立了空间多智能体对抗仿真系统,利用其验证了所提算法的正确性和有效性。

基于深度强化学习的导弹规避决策训练研究

针对载机面对敌方来袭导弹自主规避问题,采取一种基于改进的DDPG算法的深度强化学习方法进行训练学习,在奖励函数中,除考虑规避性能外,还分别针对本机的高度保持、速度保持,以及来袭导弹的相对高度变化、接近速度变化建立奖励模型。最后,基于飞机模型进行了训练仿真测试分析,通过仿真可以看出,训练所得结果可以有效实现针对来袭导弹的规避决策,所设计的奖励函数和输入参数也可以起到相应正确的作用,并且结果具备一定的泛化能力。

Stochastic pedestrian avoidance for autonomous vehicles using hybrid reinforcement learning

Ensuring the safety of pedestrians is essential and challenging when autonomous vehicles are involved.Classical pedestrian avoidance strategies cannot handle uncertainty,and learning-based methods lack performance guarantees.In this paper we propose a hybrid reinforcement learning(HRL)approach for autonomous vehicles to safely interact with pedestrians behaving uncertainly.The method integrates the rule-based strategy and reinforcement learning strategy.The confidence of both strategies is evaluated using the data recorded in the training process.Then we design an activation function to select the final policy with higher confidence.In this way,we can guarantee that the final policy performance is not worse than that of the rule-based policy.To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method,we validate it in simulation using an accelerated testing technique to generate stochastic pedestrians.The results indicate that it increases the success rate for pedestrian avoidance to 98.8%,compared with 94.4%of the baseline method.

Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems： Some Research Areas-Computational Understanding, Awareness, and Wisdom

After a brief emphasis about the interconnected world, including Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems, the increasing importance of the decision-making by autonomous, quasi-autonomous, and autonomic systems is emphasised. Promising roles of computational understanding, computational awareness, and computational wisdom for better autonomous decision-making are outlined. The contributions of simulation-based approaches are listed.