Game Theoretic Merging Behavior Control for Autonomous Vehicle at Highway On-Ramp

Abstract

In the most of previous studies, social interactions between vehicles are not considered explicitly when designing decision making and motion planning module. Nevertheless, the strong interaction exists in the most of driving scenarios, especially in highway junction. This paper presents a game theoretic merging behavior control system for autonomous vehicle at on-ramp junction considering the interaction between the merging vehicle and following vehicle in the main lane. In this work, a driving style estimation is proposed to deal with the heterogeneity of driving style. Then we adopt a model predictive control (MPC) method to plan the optimal merging trajectory based on the game theoretic decision making result. Finally, simulation and Human-in-the-loop (HIL) experiment result shows the effectiveness of our approach in on-ramp merging scenario.