Autonomous Vehicles’ Car-Following Drivability Evaluation Based on Driving Behavior Spectrum Reference Model

Abstract

A large portion of the accidents involving autonomous vehicles (AVs) are not caused by the functionality of AV, but rather because of human intervention, since AVs’ driving behavior was not properly understood by human drivers. Such misunderstanding leads to dangerous situations during interaction between AV and human-driven vehicle (HV). However, few researches considered HV-AV interaction safety in AV safety evaluation processes. One of the solutions is to let AV mimic a normal HV’s driving behavior so as to avoid misunderstanding to the most extent. Therefore, to evaluate the differences of driving behaviors between existing AV and HV is necessary. DRIVABILITY is defined in this study to characterize the similarity between AV’s driving behaviors and expected behaviors by human drivers. A driving behavior spectrum reference model built based on human drivers’ behaviors is proposed to evaluate AVs’ car-following drivability. The indicator of the desired reaction time (DRT) is proposed to characterize the car-following drivability. Relative entropy between the DRT distribution of AV and that of the entire human driver population are used to quantify the differences between driving behaviors. A human driver behavior spectrum was configured based on naturalistic driving data by human drivers collected in Shanghai, China. It is observed in the numerical test that amongst all three types of preset AVs in the well-received simulation package VTD, the brisk AV emulates a normal human driver to the most extent (ranking at 55th percentile), while the default AV and the comfortable AV rank at 35th and 8th percentile, respectively.