Social Coordination and Altruism in Autonomous Driving

Despite the advances in the autonomous driving domain, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are still inefficient and limited in terms of cooperating with each other or coordinating with vehicles operated by humans. A group of autonomous and human-driven vehicles (HVs) which work together to optimize an altruistic social utility can co-exist seamlessly and assure safety and efficiency on the road. Achieving this mission without explicit coordination among agents is challenging, mainly due to the difficulty of predicting the behavior of humans with heterogeneous preferences in mixed-autonomy environments. Formally, the authors model an AV’s maneuver planning in mixed-autonomy traffic as a partially-observable stochastic game and attempt to derive optimal policies that lead to socially-desirable outcomes using a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework (MARL), and propose a semi-sequential multi-agent training and policy dissemination algorithm for their MARL problem. They introduce a quantitative representation of the AVs’ social preferences and design a distributed reward structure that induces altruism into their decision-making process. Altruistic AVs are able to form alliances, guide the traffic, and affect the behavior of the HVs to handle competitive driving scenarios. They compare egoistic AVs to their altruistic autonomous agents in a highway merging setting and demonstrate the emerging behaviors that lead to improvement in the number of successful merges and the overall traffic flow and safety.

• Record URL:
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2022.3207872
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/41297384
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Copyright © 2022, IEEE.
• Authors:
  • Toghi, Behrad
  • Valiente, Rodolfo
  • Sadigh, Dorsa
  • Pedarsani, Ramtin
  • Fallah, Yaser P
• Publication Date: 2022-12

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 24791-24804
• Serial:
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
  • Volume: 23
  • Issue Number: 12
  • Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • ISSN: 1524-9050
  • Serial URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6979

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Autonomous vehicles; Coordination; Decision making; Social values; Vehicle mix
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01876297
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 21 2023 9:27AM