Intent-Aware Autonomous Driving: A Case Study on Highway Merging Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper explores how sharing intent information between autonomous vehicles can improve cooperation and decision-making during highway merging, demonstrated through simulation experiments.

Contribution

It introduces an intent-sharing framework for autonomous vehicles in highway merging scenarios and analyzes its impact on vehicle cooperation.

Findings

Intent sharing improves merging efficiency.

Enhanced cooperation reduces collision risk.

Framework demonstrates potential in simulated environments.

Abstract

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.