Ethical and moral decision-making for self-driving cars based on deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

Self-driving cars are expected to replace human drivers shortly, bringing significant benefits to society. However, they have faced opposition from various organizations that argue it is challenging to respond to instances involving unavoidable personal injury. In situations involving deadly collisions, self-driving cars must make decisions that balance life and death. This paper investigates the ethical and moral decision-making challenges for self-driving cars from an algorithmic perspective. To address this issue, we introduce the accident-prioritized replay mechanism to the Deep Q-Networks (DQN) algorithm based on early humanities research. The mechanism quantifies a reward function that takes priority into account. RGB (red, green, blue) images obtained by the camera installed in front of the self-driving cars are fed into the Xception network for training. To evaluate our approach, we compare it to the conventional DQN algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the Rawlsian DQN algorithm has superior stability and interpretability in decision-making. Furthermore, the majority of respondents to our survey accept the final decision made by our algorithm. Our experiment demonstrates that it is possible to incorporate ethical considerations into self-driving car decision-making, providing a solution for rational decision-making in emergency and dilemma circumstances.