Free Energy-Inspired Cognitive Risk Integration for AV Navigation in Pedestrian-Rich Environments

Abstract: Recent advances in autonomous vehicle (AV) behavior planning have shown impressive social interaction capabilities when interacting with other road users. However, achieving human-like prediction and decision-making in interactions with vulnerable road users remains a key challenge in complex multi-agent interactive environments. Existing research focuses primarily on crowd navigation for small mobile robots, which cannot be directly applied to AVs due to inherent differences in their decision-making strategies and dynamic boundaries. Moreover, pedestrians in these multi-agent simulations follow fixed behavior patterns that cannot dynamically respond to AV actions. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework for modeling interactions between the AV and multiple pedestrians. In this framework, a cognitive process modeling approach inspired by the Free Energy Principle is integrated into both the AV and pedestrian models to simulate more realistic interaction dynamics. Specifically, the proposed pedestrian Cognitive-Risk Social Force Model adjusts goal-directed and repulsive forces using a fused measure of cognitive uncertainty and physical risk to produce human-like trajectories. Meanwhile, the AV leverages this fused risk to construct a dynamic, risk-aware adjacency matrix for a Graph Convolutional Network within a Soft Actor-Critic architecture, allowing it to make more reasonable and informed decisions. Simulation results indicate that our proposed framework effectively improves safety, efficiency, and smoothness of AV navigation compared to the state-of-the-art method.