Situation Awareness for Tactical Driving
Rahul Sukthankar · 1997
A primary challenge to creating an intelligent vehicle that can competently drive in traffic is the task of tactical reasoning: deciding which maneuvers to perform in a particular driving situation, in real-time, given incomplete information about the rapidly changing traffic configuration. Human expertise in tactical driving is attributed to situation awareness, a task-specific understanding of the dynamic entities in the environment, and their projected impact on the agent’s actions. In this thesis, I demonstrate how situation awareness may be used as a basis for tactical-level reasoning in intelligent vehicles. SAPIENT (Situation Awareness Planner Implementing Effective Navigation in Traffic) combines a knowledge of high-level driving goals with low-level reactive behavior to control vehicles in a custom tactical-level simulator, SHIVA. The simulated vehicles are based on the Carnegie Mellon Navlabs, sharing a common perception and control interface, allowing researchers to port systems from simulation to real life with minimal modification. The first implementation, MonoSAPIENT, uses explicitly encoded