Planning for cars that coordinate with people: leveraging effects on human actions for planning and active information gathering over human internal state

Traditionally, autonomous cars treat human-driven vehicles like moving obstacles. They predict their future trajectories and plan to stay out of their way. While physically safe, this results in defensive and opaque behaviors. In reality, an autonomous car’s actions will actually affect what other cars will do in response, creating an opportunity for coordination. Our thesis is that we can leverage these responses to plan more efficient and communicative behaviors. We introduce a formulation of interaction with human-driven vehicles as an underactuated dynamical system, in which the robot’s actions have consequences on the state of the autonomous car, but also on the human actions and thus the state of the human-driven car. We model these consequences by approximating the human’s actions as (noisily) optimal with respect to some utility function. The robot uses the human actions as observations of her underlying utility function parameters. We first explore learning these parameters offline, and show that a robot planning in the resulting underactuated system is more efficient than when treating the person as a moving obstacle. We also show that the robot can target specific desired effects, like getting the person to switch lanes or to proceed first through an intersection. We then explore estimating these parameters online, and enable the robot to perform active information gathering: generating actions that purposefully probe the human in order to clarify their underlying utility parameters, like driving style or attention level. We show that this significantly outperforms passive estimation and improves efficiency. Planning in our model results in coordination behaviors: the robot inches forward at an intersection to see if can go through, or it reverses to make the other car proceed first. These behaviors result from the optimization, without relying on hand-coded signaling strategies. Our user studies support the utility of our model when interacting with real users.