arXiv subjects

Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub

Publications and source records attributed to Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Active Learning with Dual Model Predictive Path-Integral Control for Interaction-Aware Autonomous Highway On-ramp Merging

Merging into dense highway traffic for an autonomous vehicle is a complex decision-making task, wherein the vehicle must identify a potential gap and coordinate with surrounding human drivers, each of whom may exhibit diverse driving behaviors. Many existing methods consider other drivers to be dynamic obstacles and, as a result, are incapable of capturing the full intent of the human drivers via this passive planning. In this paper, we propose a novel dual control framework based on Model Predictive Path-Integral control to generate interactive trajectories. This framework incorporates a Bayesian inference approach to actively learn the agents' parameters, i.e., other drivers' model parameters. The proposed framework employs a sampling-based approach that is suitable for real-time implementation through the utilization of GPUs. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology through comprehensive numerical simulations conducted in both high and low-fidelity simulation scenarios focusing on autonomous on-ramp merging.

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arXiv2023

Multi-Robot Cooperative Navigation in Crowds: A Game-Theoretic Learning-Based Model Predictive Control Approach

In this paper, we develop a control framework for the coordination of multiple robots as they navigate through crowded environments. Our framework comprises of a local model predictive control (MPC) for each robot and a social long short-term memory model that forecasts pedestrians' trajectories. We formulate the local MPC formulation for each individual robot that includes both individual and shared objectives, in which the latter encourages the emergence of coordination among robots. Next, we consider the multi-robot navigation and human-robot interaction, respectively, as a potential game and a two-player game, then employ an iterative best response approach to solve the resulting optimization problems in a centralized and distributed fashion. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of coordination among robots in simulated crowd navigation.

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arXiv2023

Social Navigation in Crowded Environments with Model Predictive Control and Deep Learning-Based Human Trajectory Prediction

Crowd navigation has received increasing attention from researchers over the last few decades, resulting in the emergence of numerous approaches aimed at addressing this problem to date. Our proposed approach couples agent motion prediction and planning to avoid the freezing robot problem while simultaneously capturing multi-agent social interactions by utilizing a state-of-the-art trajectory prediction model i.e., social long short-term memory model (Social-LSTM). Leveraging the output of Social-LSTM for the prediction of future trajectories of pedestrians at each time-step given the robot's possible actions, our framework computes the optimal control action using Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the robot to navigate among pedestrians. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in multiple scenarios of simulated crowd navigation and compare it against several state-of-the-art reinforcement learning-based methods.

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arXiv2023

MR-IDM -- Merge Reactive Intelligent Driver Model: Towards Enhancing Laterally Aware Car-following Models

This paper discusses the limitations of existing microscopic traffic models in accounting for the potential impacts of on-ramp vehicles on the car-following behavior of main-lane vehicles on highways. We first surveyed U.S. on-ramps to choose a representative set of on-ramps and then collected real-world observational data from the merging vehicle's perspective in various traffic conditions ranging from free-flowing to rush-hour traffic jams. Next, as our core contribution, we introduce a novel car-following model, called MR-IDM, for highway driving that reacts to merging vehicles in a realistic way. This proposed driving model can either be used in traffic simulators to generate realistic highway driving behavior or integrated into a prediction module for autonomous vehicles attempting to merge onto the highway. We quantitatively evaluated the effectiveness of our model and compared it against several other methods. We show that MR-IDM has the least error in mimicking the real-world data, while having features such as smoothness, stability, and lateral awareness.

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arXiv2023

Minimally Disruptive Cooperative Lane-change Maneuvers

A lane-change maneuver on a congested highway could be severely disruptive or even infeasible without the cooperation of neighboring cars. However, cooperation with other vehicles does not guarantee that the performed maneuver will not have a negative impact on traffic flow unless it is explicitly considered in the cooperative controller design. In this letter, we present a socially compliant framework for cooperative lane-change maneuvers for an arbitrary number of CAVs on highways that aims to interrupt traffic flow as minimally as possible. Moreover, we explicitly impose feasibility constraints in the optimization formulation by using reachability set theory, leading to a unified design that removes the need for an iterative procedure used in prior work. We quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of our framework and compare it against previously offered approaches in terms of maneuver time and incurred throughput disruption.

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arXiv2022

Context-Aware Target Classification with Hybrid Gaussian Process prediction for Cooperative Vehicle Safety systems

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has been proposed as a potential solution to improve the robustness and safety of autonomous vehicles by improving coordination and removing the barrier of non-line-of-sight sensing. Cooperative Vehicle Safety (CVS) applications are tightly dependent on the reliability of the underneath data system, which can suffer from loss of information due to the inherent issues of their different components, such as sensors failures or the poor performance of V2X technologies under dense communication channel load. Particularly, information loss affects the target classification module and, subsequently, the safety application performance. To enable reliable and robust CVS systems that mitigate the effect of information loss, we proposed a Context-Aware Target Classification (CA-TC) module coupled with a hybrid learning-based predictive modeling technique for CVS systems. The CA-TC consists of two modules: A Context-Aware Map (CAM), and a Hybrid Gaussian Process (HGP) prediction system. Consequently, the vehicle safety applications use the information from the CA-TC, making them more robust and reliable. The CAM leverages vehicles path history, road geometry, tracking, and prediction; and the HGP is utilized to provide accurate vehicles' trajectory predictions to compensate for data loss (due to communication congestion) or sensor measurements' inaccuracies. Based on offline real-world data, we learn a finite bank of driver models that represent the joint dynamics of the vehicle and the drivers' behavior. We combine offline training and online model updates with on-the-fly forecasting to account for new possible driver behaviors. Finally, our framework is validated using simulation and realistic driving scenarios to confirm its potential in enhancing the robustness and reliability of CVS systems.

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arXiv2022

Cooperative Energy and Time-Optimal Lane Change Maneuvers with Minimal Highway Traffic Disruption

We derive optimal control policies for a Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV) and cooperating neighboring CAVs to carry out a lane change maneuver consisting of a longitudinal phase where the CAV properly positions itself relative to the cooperating neighbors and a lateral phase where it safely changes lanes. In contrast to prior work on this problem, where the CAV "selfishly" only seeks to minimize its maneuver time, we seek to ensure that the fast-lane traffic flow is minimally disrupted (through a properly defined metric). Additionally, when performing lane-changing maneuvers, we optimally select the cooperating vehicles from a set of feasible neighboring vehicles and experimentally show that the highway throughput is improved compared to the baseline case of human-driven vehicles changing lanes with no cooperation. When feasible solutions do not exist for a given maximal allowable disruption, we include a time relaxation method trading off a longer maneuver time with reduced disruption. Our analysis is also extended to multiple sequential maneuvers. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our controllers in terms of safety guarantees and up to 16% and 90% average throughput and maneuver time improvement respectively when compared to maneuvers with no cooperation.

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arXiv2020

Representing Realistic Human Driver Behaviors using a Finite Size Gaussian Process Kernel Bank

The performance of cooperative vehicular applications is tightly dependent on the reliability of the underneath Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technology. V2X standards, such as Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and Cellular-V2X (C-V2X), which are passing their research phase before being mandated in the US, are supposed to serve as reliable circulatory systems for the time-critical information in vehicular networks; however, they are still heavily suffering from scalability issues in real traffic scenarios. The technology-agnostic notion of Model-Based Communications (MBC) has been proposed in our previous works as a promising paradigm to address the scalability issue and its performance, while acquiring different modeling strategies, has been vastly studied. In this work, the modeling capabilities of a powerful non-parametric Bayesian inference scheme, i.e., Gaussian Processes (GPs), is investigated within the MBC context with more details. Our observations reveal an important potential strength of GP-based MBC scheme, i.e., its capability of accurately modeling different driving behavioral patterns by utilizing only a limited size GP kernel bank. This interesting aspect of integrating GP inference with MBC framework, which has been verified in this work using realistic driving data sets, introduces this architecture as a strong and appealing candidate to address the scalability challenge. The results confirm that our proposed approach over-performs the state of the art research in terms of the required communication rate and GP kernel bank size.

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arXiv2019

V2X System Architecture Utilizing Hybrid Gaussian Process-based Model Structures

Scalable communication is of utmost importance for reliable dissemination of time-sensitive information in cooperative vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), which is, in turn, an essential prerequisite for the proper operation of the critical cooperative safety applications. The model-based communication (MBC) is a recently-explored scalability solution proposed in the literature, which has shown a promising potential to reduce the channel congestion to a great extent. In this work, based on the MBC notion, a technology-agnostic hybrid model selection policy for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is proposed which benefits from the characteristics of the non-parametric Bayesian inference techniques, specifically Gaussian Processes. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed communication architecture on both reducing the required message exchange rate and increasing the remote agent tracking precision.

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arXiv2018

Multiple Access in Cellular V2X: Performance Analysis in Highly Congested Vehicular Networks

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication enables vehicles, roadside vulnerable users, and infrastructure facilities to communicate in an ad-hoc fashion. Cellular V2X (C-V2X), which was introduced in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) release 14 standard, has recently received significant attention due to its perceived ability to address the scalability and reliability requirements of vehicular safety applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the resource allocation of the C-V2X multiple access mechanism for high-density vehicular networks, as it can strongly impact the key performance indicators such as latency and packet delivery rate. Phenomena that can affect the communication performance are investigated and a detailed analysis of the cases that can cause possible performance degradation or system limitations, is provided. The results indicate that a unified system configuration may be necessary for all vehicles, as it is mandated for IEEE 802.11p, in order to obtain the optimum performance. In the end, we show the inter-dependence of different parameters on the resource allocation procedure with the aid of our high fidelity simulator.

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arXiv2018

A Learning-Based Framework for Two-Dimensional Vehicle Maneuver Prediction over V2V Networks

Situational awareness in vehicular networks could be substantially improved utilizing reliable trajectory prediction methods. More precise situational awareness, in turn, results in notably better performance of critical safety applications, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), as well as comfort applications like Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). Therefore, vehicle trajectory prediction problem needs to be deeply investigated in order to come up with an end to end framework with enough precision required by the safety applications' controllers. This problem has been tackled in the literature using different methods. However, machine learning, which is a promising and emerging field with remarkable potential for time series prediction, has not been explored enough for this purpose. In this paper, a two-layer neural network-based system is developed which predicts the future values of vehicle parameters, such as velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate, in the first layer and then predicts the two-dimensional, i.e. longitudinal and lateral, trajectory points based on the first layer's outputs. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated in realistic cut-in scenarios from Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) dataset and the results show a noticeable improvement in the prediction accuracy in comparison with the kinematics model which is the dominant employed model by the automotive industry. Both ideal and nonideal communication circumstances have been investigated for our system evaluation. For non-ideal case, an estimation step is included in the framework before the parameter prediction block to handle the drawbacks of packet drops or sensor failures and reconstruct the time series of vehicle parameters at a desirable frequency.

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arXiv2018

Implementation and Evaluation of a Cooperative Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Safety Application

While the development of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) safety applications based on Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) has been extensively undergoing standardization for more than a decade, such applications are extremely missing for Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Nonexistence of collaborative systems between VRUs and vehicles was the main reason for this lack of attention. Recent developments in Wi-Fi Direct and DSRC-enabled smartphones are changing this perspective. Leveraging the existing V2V platforms, we propose a new framework using a DSRC-enabled smartphone to extend safety benefits to VRUs. The interoperability of applications between vehicles and portable DSRC enabled devices is achieved through the SAE J2735 Personal Safety Message (PSM). However, considering the fact that VRU movement dynamics, response times, and crash scenarios are fundamentally different from vehicles, a specific framework should be designed for VRU safety applications to study their performance. In this article, we first propose an end-to-end Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) framework to provide situational awareness and hazard detection based on the most common and injury-prone crash scenarios. The details of our VRU safety module, including target classification and collision detection algorithms, are explained next. Furthermore, we propose and evaluate a mitigating solution for congestion and power consumption issues in such systems. Finally, the whole system is implemented and analyzed for realistic crash scenarios.

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arXiv2018

Composite α-μ Based DSRC Channel Model Using Large Data Set of RSSI Measurements

Channel modeling is essential for design and performance evaluation of numerous protocols in vehicular networks. In this work, we study and provide results for largescale and small-scale modeling of communication channel in dense vehicular networks. We first propose an approach to remove the effect of fading on deterministic part of the large-scale model and verify its accuracy using a single transmitter-receiver scenario. Two-ray model is then utilized for path-loss characterization and its parameters are derived from the empirical data based on a newly proposed method. Afterward, we use α-μ distribution to model the fading behavior of vehicular networks for the first time, and validate its precision by Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) goodness-of-fit test. To this end, the significantly better performance of utilizing α-μ distribution over the most adopted fading distribution in the vehicular channels literature, i.e. Nakagami-m, in terms of passing K-S test has been investigated and statistically verified in this paper. A large received signal strength indicator (RSSI) dataset from a measurement campaign is used to evaluate our claims. Moreover, the whole model is implemented in a reliable discrete event network simulator which is widely used in the academic and industrial research for network analysis, i.e. network simulator-3 (ns-3), to show the outcome of the proposed model in the presence of upper layer network protocols.

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arXiv2018

A Stochastic Hybrid Framework for Driver Behavior Modeling Based on Hierarchical Dirichlet Process

Scalability is one of the major issues for real-world Vehicle-to-Vehicle network realization. To tackle this challenge, a stochastic hybrid modeling framework based on a non-parametric Bayesian inference method, i.e., hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP), is investigated in this paper. This framework is able to jointly model driver/vehicle behavior through forecasting the vehicle dynamical time-series. This modeling framework could be merged with the notion of model-based information networking, which is recently proposed in the vehicular literature, to overcome the scalability challenges in dense vehicular networks via broadcasting the behavioral models instead of raw information dissemination. This modeling approach has been applied on several scenarios from the realistic Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) driving data set and the results show a higher performance of this model in comparison with the zero-hold method as the baseline.

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arXiv2018

A Driver Behavior Modeling Structure Based on Non-parametric Bayesian Stochastic Hybrid Architecture

Heterogeneous nature of the vehicular networks, which results from the co-existence of human-driven, semi-automated, and fully autonomous vehicles, is a challenging phenomenon toward the realization of the intelligent transportation systems with an acceptable level of safety, comfort, and efficiency. Safety applications highly suffer from communication resource limitations, specifically in dense and congested vehicular networks. The idea of model-based communication (MBC) has been recently proposed to address this issue. In this work, we propose Gaussian Process-based Stochastic Hybrid System with Cumulative Relevant History (CRH-GP-SHS) framework, which is a hierarchical stochastic hybrid modeling structure, built upon a non-parametric Bayesian inference method, i.e. Gaussian processes. This framework is proposed in order to be employed within the MBC context to jointly model driver/vehicle behavior as a stochastic object. Non-parametric Bayesian methods relieve the limitations imposed by non-evolutionary model structures and enable the proposed framework to properly capture different stochastic behaviors. The performance of the proposed CRH-GP-SHS framework at the inter-mode level has been evaluated over a set of realistic lane change maneuvers from NGSIM-US101 dataset. The results show a noticeable performance improvement for GP in comparison to the baseline constant speed model, specifically in critical situations such as highly congested networks. Moreover, an augmented model has also been proposed which is a composition of GP and constant speed models and capable of capturing the driver behavior under various network reliability conditions.

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arXiv2018

A Learning-based Stochastic MPC Design for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control to Handle Interfering Vehicles

Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication has a great potential to improve reaction accuracy of different driver assistance systems in critical driving situations. Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), which is an automated application, provides drivers with extra benefits such as traffic throughput maximization and collision avoidance. CACC systems must be designed in a way that are sufficiently robust against all special maneuvers such as cutting-into the CACC platoons by interfering vehicles or hard braking by leading cars. To address this problem, a Neural- Network (NN)-based cut-in detection and trajectory prediction scheme is proposed in the first part of this paper. Next, a probabilistic framework is developed in which the cut-in probability is calculated based on the output of the mentioned cut-in prediction block. Finally, a specific Stochastic Model Predictive Controller (SMPC) is designed which incorporates this cut-in probability to enhance its reaction against the detected dangerous cut-in maneuver. The overall system is implemented and its performance is evaluated using realistic driving scenarios from Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD).

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