Merging into dense highway traffic for an autonomous vehicle is a complex decision-making task, wherein the vehicle must identify a potential gap and coordinate with surrounding human drivers, each of whom may exhibit diverse driving behaviors. Many existing methods consider other drivers to be dynamic obstacles and, as a result, are incapable of capturing the full intent of the human drivers via this passive planning. In this paper, we propose a novel dual control framework based on Model Predictive Path-Integral control to generate interactive trajectories. This framework incorporates a Bayesian inference approach to actively learn the agents' parameters, i.e., other drivers' model parameters. The proposed framework employs a sampling-based approach that is suitable for real-time implementation through the utilization of GPUs. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology through comprehensive numerical simulations conducted in both high and low-fidelity simulation scenarios focusing on autonomous on-ramp merging.
@article{arxiv.2310.07840,
title = {Active Learning with Dual Model Predictive Path-Integral Control for Interaction-Aware Autonomous Highway On-ramp Merging},
author = {Jacob Knaup and Jovin D'sa and Behdad Chalaki and Tyler Naes and Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub and Ehsan Moradi-Pari and Panagiotis Tsiotras},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07840},
year = {2023}
}