Game-Theory in Practice: Application to Motion Planning and Decision Making in an Autonomous Shuttle Bus

Autonomous techniques are becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Many advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including functions like lane-keeping assist and car following, are already implemented in vehicles for controlled environments such as highways. However, to enhance the capabilities of current ADAS, it is essential to extend their application to more general scenarios, like urban driving. Urban environments pose considerable challenges due to the high density of traffic participants, including pedestrians and cyclists, whose behaviors are unpredictable and necessitate strong interactions with self-driving vehicles. Addressing these complex interactions through real-time decision-making is particularly challenging but crucial for effective operation in real-world urban settings. This paper aims to bring the decision-making process of autonomous driving techniques closer to real life by proposing a motion planning and decision-making framework that utilizes game theory to formulate and consider strong interactions. Additionally, we introduce a human-like attention-based traffic actor filter to enable the autonomous vehicle to focus on critical traffic participants with a higher risk of collision. The framework is tested in both simulation and real-world scenarios, demonstrating that the algorithm can make safe and efficient decisions under various traffic scenarios involving multiple types of traffic participants in real time.