One of the greatest challenges towards fully autonomous cars is the understanding of complex and dynamic scenes. Such understanding is needed for planning of maneuvers, especially those that are particularly frequent such as lane changes. While in recent years advanced driver-assistance systems have made driving safer and more comfortable, these have mostly focused on car following scenarios, and less on maneuvers involving lane changes. In this work we propose a situation assessment algorithm for classifying driving situations with respect to their suitability for lane changing. For this, we propose a deep learning architecture based on a Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network, which uses Long Short-Term Memory units, and integrates a prediction component in the form of the Intelligent Driver Model. We prove the feasibility of our algorithm on the publicly available NGSIM datasets, where we outperform existing methods.
@cite_5: Automated driving within a lane is a fascinating experience already. However, more exiting but also technically more challenging is to dare the next step of automating tactical behavior decisions for lane changes, as well. In this paper, we present our approach for situation assessment in tactical behavior planning for lane changes, whether lane changes are beneficial and or possible. We present a way to tackle perception uncertainties and how to monitor the system's abilities and current skills. This is achieved by a dynamic Bayesian network and an unscented variance transform. Our approach is evaluated not only in a simulation, but also in real traffic. Our implementation has recently been demonstrated to the public in the Audi A7 piloted driving concept vehicle, driving 550 miles from Stanford to Las Vegas to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015.
@cite_14: 
@cite_8: We propose an image based end-to-end learning framework that helps lane-change decisions for human drivers and autonomous vehicles. The proposed system, Safe Lane-Change Aid Network (SLCAN), trains a deep convolutional neural network to classify the status of adjacent lanes from rear view images acquired by cameras mounted on both sides of the vehicle. Rather than depending on any explicit object detection or tracking scheme, SLCAN reads the whole input image and directly decides whether initiation of the lane-change at the moment is safe or not. We collected and annotated 77,273 rear side view images to train and test SLCAN. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves 96.98 classification accuracy although the test images are from unseen roadways. We also visualize the saliency map to understand which part of image SLCAN looks at for correct decisions.
Most related and comparable to our work are binary classification problems assessing the suitability of a situation for a lane change, as the previously mentioned work from Ulbrich @cite_5 . @cite_14 described a gap assessment model for discretionary lane changes using SVMs. For evaluation purposes a selected subset of the NGSIM US Highway 101 (US 101) dataset was used. Their approach outperformed previous ones, correctly classifying 97.48 @cite_8 addressed the problem using fuzzy logic rules, with the aim of supporting the driver in lane change decisions. The NGSIM Interstate 80 (I-80) and the US 101 dataset were used while considering only certain lanes and time periods. Correct recommendations were given in 90.50