A Cooperation-Aware Lane Change Method for Automated Vehicles

Lane change for automated vehicles (AVs) is an important but challenging task in complex dynamic traffic environments. Due to difficulties in guaranteeing safety as well as a high efficiency, AVs are inclined to choose relatively conservative strategies for lane change. To avoid the conservatism, this paper presents a cooperation-aware lane change method utilizing interactions between vehicles. We first propose an interactive trajectory prediction method to explore possible cooperations between an AV and the others. Further, an evaluation on safety, efficiency and comfort is designed to make a decision on lane change. Thereafter, we propose a motion planning algorithm based on model predictive control (MPC), which incorporates AV’s decision and surrounding vehicles’ interactive behaviors into constraints so as to avoid collisions during lane change. Quantitative testing results show that compared with the methods without an interactive prediction, our method enhances driving efficiencies of the AV and other vehicles by 14.8% and 2.6%, respectively, which indicates that a proper utilization of vehicle interactions can effectively reduce the conservatism of the AV and promote the cooperation between the AV and others.