Evolutionary Decision-Making and Planning for Autonomous Driving: A Hybrid Augmented Intelligence Framework

Recently, thanks to the introduction of human feedback, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has achieved remarkable success in the language processing field. Analogically, human drivers are expected to have great potential in improving the performance of autonomous driving under real-world traffic. Therefore, this study proposes a novel framework for evolutionary decision-making and planning by developing a hybrid augmented intelligence (HAI) method to introduce human feedback into the learning process. In the framework, a decision-making scheme based on interactive reinforcement learning (Int-RL) is first developed. Specifically, a human driver evaluates the learning level of the ego vehicle in real-time and intervenes to assist the learning of the vehicle with a conditional sampling mechanism, which encourages the vehicle to pursue human preferences and punishes the bad experience of conflicts with the human. Then, the longitudinal and lateral motion planning tasks are performed utilizing model predictive control (MPC), respectively. The multiple constraints from the vehicle’s physical limitation and driving task requirements are elaborated. Finally, a safety guarantee mechanism is proposed to ensure the safety of the HAI system. Specifically, a safe driving envelope is established, and a safe exploration/exploitation logic based on the trial-and-error on the desired decision is designed. Simulation with a high-fidelity vehicle model is conducted, and results show the proposed framework can realize an efficient, reliable, and safe evolution to pursue higher traffic efficiency of the ego vehicle in both multi-lane and congested ramp scenarios.