Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Method for Autonomous Vehicle Behavior Planning

October 2020

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Method for Autonomous Vehicle Behavior Planning

Authors:

Zhiqian Qiao, Zachariah Tyree, Priyantha Mudalige, Jeff Schneider, and John M. Dolan
Conference Paper
Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Abstract:

Behavioral decision making is an important aspect of autonomous vehicles (AV). In this work, we propose a behavior planning structure based on hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network is capable of 1) learning one task with multiple sub-goals simultaneously; 2) extracting attentions of states according to changing subgoals during the learning process; 3) reusing the well-trained network of sub-goals for other tasks with the same sub-goals. A hybrid reward mechanism is designed for different hierarchical layers in the proposed HRL structure. Compared to traditional RL methods, our algorithm is more sample-efficient, since its modular design allows reusing the policies of sub-goals across similar tasks for various transportation scenarios. The results show that the proposed method converges to an optimal policy faster than traditional RL methods.

Notes:

@conference{Qiao-2020-129557,
author = {Zhiqian Qiao And Zachariah Tyree And Priyantha Mudalige And Jeff Schneider And John M. Dolan},
title = {Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Method for Autonomous Vehicle Behavior Planning},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2020},
month = {October},
pages = {6084 - 6089},
keywords = {autonomous driving, hierarchical reinforcement learning, behavior planning, intersections},
}
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.