Increasing the Safety of Adaptive Cruise Control Using Physics-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Sorin Liviu Jurj, Dominik Grundt, Tino Werner, Philipp Borchers, Karina Rothemann and Eike Möhlmann
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Sorin Liviu Jurj: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
Dominik Grundt: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
Tino Werner: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
Philipp Borchers: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
Karina Rothemann: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany
Eike Möhlmann: OFFIS e.V. Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 22, 1-19

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for improving the safety of vehicles equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) by making use of Machine Learning (ML) and physical knowledge. More exactly, we train a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm that makes use of physical knowledge such as the jam-avoiding distance in order to automatically adjust the ideal longitudinal distance between the ego- and leading-vehicle, resulting in a safer solution. In our use case, the experimental results indicate that the physics-guided (PG) RL approach is better at avoiding collisions at any selected deceleration level and any fleet size when compared to a pure RL approach, proving that a physics-informed ML approach is more reliable when developing safe and efficient Artificial Intelligence (AI) components in autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Keywords: adaptive cruise control; informed machine learning; physics-guided reinforcement learning; safety; autonomous vehicles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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