GamePlan: Game-Theoretic Multi-Agent Planning with Human Drivers at Intersections, Roundabouts, and Merging

Abstract

We present a new method for multi-agent planning involving human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AVs) in unsignaled intersections, roundabouts, and during merging. In multi-agent planning, the main challenge is to predict the actions of other agents, especially human drivers, as their intentions are hidden from other agents. Our algorithm uses game theory to develop a new auction, called GAMEPLAN, that directly determines the optimal action for each agent based on their driving style (which is observable via commonly available sensors like lidars and cameras). GAMEPLAN assigns a higher priority to more aggressive or impatient drivers and a lower priority to more conservative or patient drivers; we theoretically prove that such an approach, although counter-intuitive, is gametheoretically optimal. Our approach successfully prevents collisions and deadlocks. We compare our approach with prior state-of-the-art auction techniques including economic auctions, time-based auctions (first-in first-out), and random bidding and show that each of these methods result in collisions among agents when taking into account driver behavior. We additionally compare with methods based on deep reinforcement learning, deep learning, and game theory and present our benefits over these approaches. Finally, we show that our approach can be implemented in the real-world with human drivers.

Using Graph-Theoretic Machine Learning to Predict Human Driver Behavior

“…Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are an active area of research, successfully employing tools from machine learning [27], perception [30], planning and driver behavior modeling [52]. Recently, there have been multiple breakthroughs in perceptionbased tasks in autonomous driving in areas that include object detection [28], tracking [6], [10], trajectory prediction [11], [7], [12], and planning [14], [40]. While these advances have been widely successful, current AVs still lack the ability to interact with multiple human drivers in dense traffic scenarios [13] such as intersections and merging on highways.…”