Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Wilko Schwarting

Daniela Rus

Sertac Karaman

Alyssa Pierson

Anshula Gandhi

Cristian-Ioan Vasile

Javier Alonso Mora

Daniela L Rus

Understanding the intent of human drivers and adapting to their driving styles is used to increased efficiency and safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) by enabling them to behave in safe and predictable ways without requiring explicit inter-vehicle communication. A Social Value Orientation (SVO), which quantifies the degree of an agent's selfishness or altruism, is estimated by the AV for other vehicles to better predict how they will interact and cooperate with others. Interactions between agents are modeled as a best response game wherein each agent negotiates to maximize their own utility. A dynamic game solution uses the Nash equilibrium, yielding an online method of predicting multi-agent interactions given their SVOs. This approach allows autonomous vehicles to observe human drivers, estimate their SVOs, and generate an autonomous control policy in real time.

Social behavior for autonomous vehicles

An approach to autonomous navigation of a vehicle augments a static map of an environment with a clutter map characterizing a risk of encountering an object that is not represented in the static map of the environment. For example, the clutter map may be based on locations and velocities of those objects, and route planning may avoid planning a path through locations that have a high risk of occupancy, and therefore potential delay or collision.

Autonomous navigation in a cluttered environment

A method is disclosed for use in a planning agent, the method including: identifying a first agent in a vicinity of the planning agent; identifying a location of the first agent and a velocity of the first agent; calculating a set of occupancy costs for the first agent, each occupancy cost in the set of occupancy costs being associated with a different respective location in the vicinity of the planning agent, each occupancy cost in the set of occupancy costs being calculated at least in part based on a cost function that depends on the location of the first agent and the velocity of the first agent; and changing at least one of speed or direction of travel of the planning agent based on the set of occupancy costs.

Navigating congested environments with risk level sets

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Wilko Schwarting