Impact-aware Maneuver Decision with Enhanced Perception for Autonomous Vehicle

Autonomous driving is an emerging technology that has developed rapidly over the last decade. There have been numerous interdisciplinary challenges imposed on the current transportation system by autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we conduct an algorithmic study on the autonomous vehicle decision-making process, which is a fundamental problem in the vehicle automation field and the root cause of most traffic congestion. We propose a perception-and-decision framework, called HEAD, which consists of an enHanced pErception module and a mAneuver Decision module. HEAD aims to enable the autonomous vehicle to perform safe, efficient, and comfortable maneuvers with minimal impact on other vehicles. In the enhanced perception module, a graph-based state prediction model with a strategy of phantom vehicle construction is proposed to predict the one-step future states for multiple surrounding vehicles in parallel, which deals with sensor limitations such as limited detection range and poor detection accuracy under occlusions. Then in the maneuver decision module, a deep reinforcement learning-based model is designed to learn a policy for the autonomous vehicle to perform maneuvers in continuous action space w.r.t. a parameterized action Markov decision process. A hybrid reward function takes into account aspects of safety, efficiency, comfort, and impact to guide the autonomous vehicle to make optimal maneuver decisions. Extensive experiments offer evidence that HEAD can advance the state of the art in terms of both macroscopic and microscopic effectiveness.