Safe and Human-Like Autonomous Driving: A Predictor-Corrector Potential Game Approach

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel decision-making framework for autonomous vehicles (AVs), called predictor-corrector potential game (PCPG), composed of a Predictor and a Corrector. To enable human-like reasoning and characterize agent interactions, a receding-horizon multi-player game is formulated. To address the challenges caused by the complexity in solving a multi-player game and by the requirement of real-time operation, a potential game (PG) based decision-making framework is developed. In the PG Predictor, the agent cost functions are heuristically predefined. We acknowledge that the behaviors of other traffic agents, e.g., human-driven vehicles and pedestrians, may not necessarily be consistent with the predefined cost functions. To address this issue, a best response-based PG Corrector is designed. In the Corrector, the action deviation between the ego vehicle prediction and the surrounding agent actual behaviors are measured and are fed back to the ego vehicle decision-making, to correct the prediction errors caused by the inaccurate predefined cost functions and to improve the ego vehicle strategies. Distinguished from most existing game-theoretic approaches, this PCPG 1) deals with multi-player games and guarantees the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE), convergence of the PSNE seeking algorithm, and global optimality of the derived PSNE when multiple PSNE exist; 2) is computationally scalable in a multi-agent scenario; 3) guarantees the ego vehicle safety under certain conditions; and 4) approximates the actual PSNE of the system despite the unknown cost functions of others. Comparative studies between the PG, the PCPG, and the control barrier function (CBF) based approaches are conducted in diverse traffic scenarios, including oncoming traffic scenario and multi-vehicle intersection-crossing scenario.