Don’t Get into Trouble! Risk-aware Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Risk is traditionally described as the expected likelihood of an undesirable outcome, such as a collision for an autonomous vehicle. Accurately predicting risk or potentially risky situations is critical for the safe operation of an autonomous vehicle. This work combines use of a controller trained to navigate around individuals in a crowd and a risk-based decision-making framework for an autonomous vehicle that integrates high-level risk-based path planning with a reinforcement learning-based low-level control. We evaluated our method using a high-fidelity simulation environment. We show our method results in zero collisions with pedestrians and predicted the least risky path, time to travel, or day to travel in approximately 72% of traversals. This work can improve safety by allowing an autonomous vehicle to one day avoid and react to risky situations.