Towards Active Motion Planning in Interactive Driving Scenarios: A Generic Utility Term of Interaction Activeness

Abstract

Interacting with other vehicles while ensuring safety is a routine task for human drivers, but it can pose a challenge for autonomous vehicles. To address this challenge, we derived a generic utility term of interaction activeness (UTIA) from the driving interaction formulation which considers the rationality of interacting counterparts. Our research shows that incorporating UTIA as a supplementary utility term can improve the active interaction capability of both sampling-based and game-theoretic baseline motion planners without compromising safety. Through simulation experiments, we observed that on average, incorporating the weighted UTIA into the utility function of baseline planners can result in an 8.8% increase in the success rate of exiting a highway within a set distance.