A New Approach for Tactical Decision Making in Lane Changing: Sample Efficient Deep Q Learning with a Safety Feedback Reward
This addresses safety-critical and uncertain lane-changing decisions for autonomous vehicles, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with a new reward scheme.
The paper tackled automated lane change for autonomous vehicles by introducing a safety feedback reward scheme with Rainbow DQN, resulting in improved performance and sample efficiency, achieving superior results in challenging scenarios with only 200,000 training steps (equivalent to 55 hours of driving).
Automated lane change is one of the most challenging task to be solved of highly automated vehicles due to its safety-critical, uncertain and multi-agent nature. This paper presents the novel deployment of the state of art Q learning method, namely Rainbow DQN, that uses a new safety driven rewarding scheme to tackle the issues in an dynamic and uncertain simulation environment. We present various comparative results to show that our novel approach of having reward feedback from the safety layer dramatically increases both the agent's performance and sample efficiency. Furthermore, through the novel deployment of Rainbow DQN, it is shown that more intuition about the agent's actions is extracted by examining the distributions of generated Q values of the agents. The proposed algorithm shows superior performance to the baseline algorithm in the challenging scenarios with only 200000 training steps (i.e. equivalent to 55 hours driving).