Autonomous vehicle social behavior for highway entrance ramp management

“Socially cooperative driving” is an integral part of our everyday driving, hence requiring special attention to imbue the autonomous driving with a more natural driving behavior. In this paper, an intention-integrated Prediction- and Cost function-Based algorithm (iPCB) framework is proposed to enable an autonomous vehicle to perform cooperative social behavior. An intention estimator is developed to extract the probability of surrounding agents' intentions in real time. Then for each candidate strategy, a prediction engine considering the interaction between host and surrounding agents is used to predict future scenarios. A cost function-based evaluation is applied to compute the cost for each scenario and select the decision corresponding to the lowest cost. The algorithm was tested in simulation on an autonomous vehicle cooperating with vehicles merging from freeway entrance ramps with 10,000 randomly generated scenarios. Compared with approaches that do not take social behavior into account, the iPCB algorithm shows a 41.7% performance improvement based on the chosen cost functions.