Toward Closing the Loop on Human Values

Abstract

Human drivers navigate the roadways by balancing values such as safety, legality, and mobility. An automated vehicle driving on the same roadways as humans likely needs to navigate based on similar values. The iterative methodology of value sensitive design (VSD) is used to formalize the connection of human values to engineering specifications. A modified VSD methodology is used to develop an automated vehicle speed control algorithm to safely navigate a pedestrian crosswalk. Two VSD iterations are presented that model the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process and use dynamic programming to compute an optimal policy to control the longitudinal acceleration of the vehicle based on the belief of whether a pedestrian is crossing. The speed control algorithms were tested in real time on an experimental vehicle on a closed-road course.