Situation-Aware Interactive MPC Switching for Autonomous Driving

Abstract: To enable autonomous driving in interactive traffic scenarios, various model predictive control (MPC) formulations have been proposed, each employing different interaction models. While higher-fidelity models enable more intelligent behavior, they incur increased computational cost. Since strong interactions are relatively infrequent in traffic, a practical strategy for balancing performance and computational overhead is to invoke an appropriate controller based on situational demands. To achieve this approach, we first conduct a comparative study to assess and hierarchize the interactive capabilities of different MPC formulations. Furthermore, we develop a neural network-based classifier to enable situation-aware switching among controllers with different levels of interactive capability. We demonstrate that this situation-aware switching can both substantially improve overall performance by activating the most advanced interactive MPC in rare but critical situations, and significantly reduce computational load by using a basic MPC in the majority of scenarios.