A Conflict Resolution Dataset Derived from Argoverse-2: Analysis of the Safety and Efficiency Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles at Intersections

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-quality dataset derived from Argoverse-2 to analyze how autonomous vehicles impact safety and efficiency at intersections, revealing that AVs slightly reduce overall efficiency but maintain safety levels similar to human drivers.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, curated conflict resolution dataset from real-world data and introduces new safety and efficiency measures for analyzing AV interactions at intersections.

Findings

Humans show similar safety and efficiency with AVs and other humans.

Pedestrians exhibit more diverse reactions to AVs.

AVs reduce average intersection efficiency by 8.6%.

Abstract

As the deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in mixed traffic flow becomes increasingly prevalent, ensuring safe and smooth interactions between AVs and human agents is of critical importance. How road users resolve conflicts at intersections has significant impacts on driving safety and traffic efficiency. These impacts depend on both the behaviours of AVs and humans' reactions to the presence of AVs. Therefore, using real-world data to assess and compare the safety and efficiency measures of AV-involved and AV-free scenarios is crucial. To this end, this paper presents a high-quality conflict resolution dataset derived from the open Argoverse-2 motion forecasting data to analyse the safety and efficiency impacts of AVs. The contribution is twofold: First, we propose and apply a specific data processing pipeline to select scenarios of interest, rectify data errors, and enhance the raw data in Argoverse-2. As a result, 5000+ cases where an AV resolves conflict with a human road user and 16000+ conflict resolution cases without AVs are obtained. Motion data is smooth and consistent in these cases. This open dataset comprises diverse and balanced conflict resolution regimes. Second, this paper employs surrogate safety measures and a novel efficiency measure to assess the impact of AVs at intersections. The results suggest that human drivers exhibit similar safety and efficiency performances when interacting with AVs and with other human drivers. In contrast, pedestrians demonstrate more diverse reactions. Furthermore, due to the safety-prior strategy of AVs, the average efficiency of AV-involved conflict resolution decreases by 8.6% compared to AV-free cases. This informative dataset provides a valuable resource for researchers and the findings give insights into the possible impacts of AVs. The dataset is openly available via https://github.com/RomainLITUD/conflict_resolution_dataset.