Intent-Aware Autonomous Driving: A Case Study on Highway Merging Scenarios
This work addresses coordination challenges for autonomous vehicles in specific merging scenarios, but it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation frameworks and focuses on a simple two-agent setting.
The paper tackled the problem of autonomous vehicle cooperation in highway merging by using intent-sharing between two agents, resulting in improved decision-making strategies as demonstrated in a simulated environment.
In this work, we use the communication of intent as a means to facilitate cooperation between autonomous vehicle agents. Generally speaking, intents can be any reliable information about its future behavior that a vehicle communicates with another vehicle. We implement this as an intent-sharing task atop the merging environment in the simulator of highway-env, which provides a collection of environments for learning decision-making strategies for autonomous vehicles. Under a simple setting between two agents, we carefully investigate how intent-sharing can aid the receiving vehicle in adjusting its behavior in highway merging scenarios.