Towards a Driver Model: Preliminary Study of Lane Change Behavior

The presented work formulates an framework in which early prediction of drivers lane change behavior is realized. We aim to build a representation of drivers lane change behavior in order to recognize and to predict driver´s intentions as a first step towards a realistic driver model. In the test bed of the Institute of Neuroinformatik, based on the traffic simulator NISYS TRS ¹, 10 individuals have driven in the experiments and they performed more then 150 lane change maneuvers. Lane-offset, distance to the front car and time to contact, were recorded. The acquired data was used to train - in parallel- a recurrent neural network, a feed forward neural network and a set of support vector machines. In the followed test drives the system was able of performing a lane change prediction time of 1.5 sec beforehand. The proposed approach describes a framework for lane-change detection and prediction, which will serve as a prerequisite for a successful driver model.