Zhang, Yanze (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Lyu, Yiwei (Carnegie Mellon University), Demir, Sude Ela (University of Texas at Austin), ZHOU, XINGYU (University of Texas at Austin), Yang, Yupeng (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Wang, Junmin (The University of Texas at Austin), Luo, Wenhao (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Courteous MPC for Autonomous Driving with CBF-Inspired Risk Assessment

Scheduled for presentation during the Invited Session "Safety for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles" (ThBT3), Thursday, September 26, 2024, 14:50−15:10, Salon 6

2024 IEEE 27th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), September 24- 27, 2024, Edmonton, Canada

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 14, 2024

Abstract

With more autonomous vehicles (AVs) sharing roadways with human-driven vehicles (HVs), ensuring safe and courteous maneuvers that respect HVs' behavior becomes increasingly important. To promote both safety and courtesy in AV's behavior, an extension of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs)-inspired risk evaluation framework is proposed in this paper by considering both noisy observed positions and velocities of surrounding vehicles. The perceived risk by the ego vehicle can be visualized as a risk map that reflects the understanding of the surrounding environment and thus shows the potential for facilitating safe and courteous driving. By incorporating the risk evaluation framework into the Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme, we propose a Courteous MPC for ego AV to generate courteous behaviors that 1) reduce the overall risk imposed on other vehicles and 2) respect the hard safety constraints and the original objective for efficiency. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed Courteous MPC via theoretical analysis and simulation experiments.