PnP: Integrated Prediction and Planning for Interactive Lane Change in Dense Traffic

Making human-like decisions for autonomous driving in interactive scenarios is crucial and difficult, requiring the self-driving vehicle to reason about the reactions of interactive vehicles to its behavior. To handle this challenge, we provide an integrated prediction and planning (PnP) decision-making approach. A reactive trajectory prediction model is developed to predict the future states of other actors in order to account for the interactive nature of the behaviors. Then, n-step temporal-difference search is used to make a tactical decision and plan the tracking trajectory for the self-driving vehicle by combining the value estimation network with the reactive prediction model. The proposed PnP method is evaluated using the CARLA simulator, and the results demonstrate that PnP obtains superior performance compared to popular model-free and model-based reinforcement learning baselines.