Real-time behaviour planning and highway situation analysis concept with scenario classification and risk estimation for autonomous vehicles

Abstract

The development of autonomous vehicles is one of the most active research areas in the automotive industry. The objective of this study is to present a concept for analysing a vehicle’s current situation and a decision-making algorithm which determines an optimal and safe series of manoeuvres to be executed. Our work focuses on a machine learning-based approach by using neural networks for risk estimation, comparing different classification algorithms for traffic density estimation and using probabilistic and decision networks for behaviour planning. A situation analysis is carried out by a traffic density classifier module and a risk estimation algorithm, which predicts risks in a discrete manoeuvre space. For real-time operation, we applied a neural network approach, which approximates the results of the algorithm we used as a ground truth, and a labelling solution for the network’s training data. For the classification of the current traffic density, we used a support vector machine. The situation analysis provides input for the decision making. For this task, we applied probabilistic networks.