Resolving predicted conflicts is vital for safe and efficient autonomous vehicles (AV). In practice, vehicular motion prediction faces inherent uncertainty due to heterogeneous driving behaviours and environments. This spatial uncertainty increases non-linearly with prediction time horizons, leading AVs to perceive more road space occupied by conflicting vehicles. Reacting early to resolve predicted conflicts can ensure safety but may adversely affect traffic efficiency. Therefore, determining how far ahead AVs should start resolving predicted conflicts based on safety and traffic efficiency constraints is crucial. To answer this question, this study proposes a novel approach to explore the trade-off between safety and traffic efficiency considering prediction uncertainty. Firstly, a continuous-time motion prediction framework is proposed for estimating the spatial probability distribution of a vehicle’s future position at any moment within the maximum time horizon. Subsequently, average driver space and the corresponding traffic flow are derived from the safety settings of AV and prediction uncertainty. As such, the safety-efficiency trade-off can be quantified. Experiments show that mandatory decision points, high speeds, and traffic state transitions usually cause fast-increasing prediction uncertainty. A case study of Intelligent Driver Models (IDM) shows that traffic efficiency drops rapidly when AVs resolve predicted conflicts longer than 1.5 seconds ahead. AVs can act earlier on motorways for efficiency concerns but must be myopic at urban intersections. Prediction uncertainty fundamentally constrains the safety-efficiency performance of AVs. These findings are instructive for designing traffic-compatible AVs.

Predicting the trajectories of road agents is fundamental for self-driving cars. Trajectory prediction contains many sources of uncertainty in data and modelling. A thorough understanding of this uncertainty is crucial in a safety-critical task like auto-piloting a vehicle. In practice, it is necessary to distinguish between the uncertainty caused by partial observability of all factors that may affect a driver's near-future decisions, the so-called aleatoric uncertainty, and the uncertainty of deploying a model in new scenarios that are possibly not present in the training set, the so-called epistemic uncertainty. They reflect the trade-off between data collection and model improvement In this paper, we propose a new framework to systematically quantify both sources of uncertainty. Specifically, to approximate the spatial distribution of an agent's future position, we propose a 2D histogram-based deep learning model combined with deep ensemble techniques for measuring aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty by entropy-based quantities. The proposed Uncertainty Quantification Network (UQnet) employs a causal part to enhance its generalizability so rare driving behaviours can be effectively identified. Experiments on the INTERACTION dataset show that UQnet is able to give more robust predictions in generalizability tests compared to the correlation-based models. Further analysis presents that high aleatoric uncertainty cases are mainly caused by heterogeneous driving behaviours and unknown intended directions. Based on this aleatoric uncertainty component, we estimate the lower bounds of mean-square-error and final-displacement-error as indicators for the predictability of trajectories. Furthermore, the analysis of epistemic uncertainty illustrates that domain knowledge of speed-dependent driving behaviour is essential for adapting a model from low-speed to high-speed situations. Our paper contributes to motion forecasting with a new framework, that recasts the problem of accuracy improvement in a way that focuses on differentiating between unpredictable components and rare cases for which more and different data should be collected.

Modelling, predicting and analysing driver behaviours are essential to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the comprehensive understanding of complex driving scenarios. Recently, with the development of deep learning (DL), numerous driver behaviour learning (DBL) methods have been proposed and applied in connected vehicles (CV) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). This study provides a review of DBL, which mainly focuses on typical applications in CV and ITS. First, a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art DBL is presented. Next, Given the constantly changing nature of real driving scenarios, most existing learning-based models may suffer from the so-called “catastrophic forgetting,” which refers to their inability to perform well in previously learned scenarios after acquiring new ones. As a solution to the aforementioned issue, this paper presents a framework for continual driver behaviour learning (CDBL) by leveraging continual learning technology. The proposed CDBL framework is demonstrated to outperform existing methods in behaviour prediction through a case study. Finally, future works, potential challenges and emerging trends in this area are highlighted.