A Multi-State Social Force Based Framework for Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction in Uncontrolled Pedestrian Crossing Scenarios

Abstract: Vehicle-pedestrian interaction (VPI) is one of the most challenging tasks for automated driving systems. The design of driving strategies for such systems usually starts with verifying VPI in simulation. This work proposed an improved framework for the study of VPI in uncontrolled pedestrian crossing scenarios. The framework admits the mutual effect between the pedestrian and the vehicle. A multi-state social force based pedestrian motion model was designed to describe the microscopic motion of the pedestrian crossing behavior. The pedestrian model considers major interaction factors such as the accepted gap of the pedestrian's decision on when to start crossing, the desired speed of the pedestrian, and the effect of the vehicle on the pedestrian while the pedestrian is crossing the road. Vehicle driving strategies focus on the longitudinal motion control, for which the feedback obstacle avoidance control and the model predictive control were tested and compared in the framework. The simulation results verified that the proposed framework can generate a variety of VPI scenarios, consisting of either the pedestrian yielding to the vehicle or the vehicle yielding to the pedestrian. The framework can be easily extended to apply different approaches to the VPI problems.