Decision-Making Method of Autonomous Vehicles in Urban Environments Considering Traffic Laws

Abstract

In order to improve the efficiency and safety of autonomous vehicles’ decision-making process in complex urban scenarios, a decision-making method for hierarchical processing of static traffic law information and dynamic traffic participant information is proposed in this paper. In the decision-making method, the candidate behavior set is constructed by extracting the element of traffic laws and fully considering the traffic laws constraints to ensure the legality and effectiveness of the decision-making algorithm. Besides, four evaluation indicators and two-level entry threshold are designed to select the optimal driving behavior with the consideration of driving efficiency, ride safety and macro path requirement. The advantage of proposed method is that it avoids the problem of poor adaptability to traffic laws and regulations as the existing methods usually make decisions under the condition of mixed traffic laws and traffic participant information. A complete driving task simulation and analysis, including six typical urban traffic scenarios, is given under Matlab environment. The results show that the proposed decision-making method is able to make reasonable and feasible decisions and highly consistent with the actual driver’s decision-making behavior in complex urban scenarios, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.