Imitation learning based decision-making for autonomous vehicle control at traffic roundabouts

The essential of developing an advanced driving assistance system is to learn human-like decisions to enhance driving safety. When controlling a vehicle, joining roundabouts smoothly and timely is a challenging task even for human drivers. In this paper, we propose a novel imitation learning based decision making framework to provide recommendations to join roundabouts. Our proposed approach takes observations from a monocular camera mounted on vehicle as input and use deep policy networks to provide decisions when is the best timing to enter a roundabout. The domain expert guided learning framework can not only improve the decision-making but also speed up the convergence of the deep policy networks. We evaluate the proposed framework by comparing with state-of-the-art supervised learning methods, including conventional supervised learning methods, such as SVM and kNN, and deep learning based methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the imitation learning-based decision making framework, which ourperforms supervised learning methods, can be applied in driving assistance system to facilitate better decision-making when approaching roundabouts.