Probabilistic online POMDP decision making for lane changes in fully automated driving

The Stadtpilot project aims at fully automated driving on Braunschweig´s inner city ring road. The TU Braunschweig´s research vehicle “Leonie” is one of the first vehicles having the ability of fully automated driving in real urban traffic scenarios. This paper shows our decision making approach for performing lane changes while driving fully automated in urban environments. We apply an online Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to accommodate inevitable sensor noise to be faced in urban traffic scenarios. In this paper we propose a two step algorithm to keep the complexity of the POMDP low enough for real-time decision making while driving. The presented approach has been integrated in our vehicle and was evaluated in real urban traffic.