Cars that coordinate with people

Autonomous cars tend to treat people like obstacles whose motion needs to be anticipated, so that the car can best stay out of their way. This results in ultra-defensive cars that cannot coordinate with people, because they miss on a key aspect of coordination: it’s not just the car interpreting and responding to the actions of people, people also interpret and respond to the car’s actions.

Professor Dragan will introduce a mathematical formulation of interaction that accounts for this, and show how learning and optimal control can be leveraged to generate car behavior that results in natural coordination strategies, like the car negotiating a merge or inching forward at an intersection to test whether it can go.

Speaker: Anca Dragan, UC Berkeley