Learning-Based Hierarchical Decision-Making Framework for Automatic Driving in Incompletely Connected Traffic Scenarios

The decision-making algorithm serves as a fundamental component for advancing the level of autonomous driving. The end-to-end decision-making algorithm has a strong ability to process the original data, but it has grave uncertainty. However, other learning-based decision-making algorithms rely heavily on ideal state information and are entirely unsuitable for autonomous driving tasks in real-world scenarios with incomplete global information. Addressing this research gap, this paper proposes a stable hierarchical decision-making framework with images as the input. The first step of the framework is a model-based data encoder that converts the input image data into a fixed universal data format. Next is a state machine based on a time series Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), which is used to classify the current driving state. Finally, according to the state’s classification, the corresponding rule-based algorithm is selected for action generation. Through verification, the algorithm demonstrates the ability to perform autonomous driving tasks in different traffic scenarios without relying on global network information. Comparative experiments further confirm the effectiveness of the hierarchical framework, model-based image data encoder, and time series GCN.