Interaction-Aware Model Predictive Decision-Making for Socially-Compliant Autonomous Driving in Mixed Urban Traffic Scenarios

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles must negotiate with pedestrians in ways that are both safe and socially compliant. We present an interaction-aware model predictive decision-making (IAMPDM) framework that integrates a gap-acceptance-inspired intention model with MPC to jointly reason about human intent and vehicle control in real time. The pedestrian module produces a continuous crossing-propensity signal - driven by time-to-collision (TTC) with an intention discounting mechanism - that modulates MPC safety terms and minimum-distance constraints. We implement IAMPDM in a projection-based, motion-tracked simulator and compare it against a rule-based intention-aware controller (RBDM) and a conservative non-interactive baseline (NIA). In a human-in-the-decision-loop study with 25 participants, intention-aware methods shortened negotiation and completion time relative to NIA across scenarios, at the expense of tighter TTC/DST margins, with no significant difference between IAMPDM and RBDM except for TTC in one scenario. Results indicate that intention-aware decision-making algorithms reduce pedestrian crossing time and improve subjective ratings of comfort, safety, and trust relative to a non-cooperative decision-making algorithm. We discuss implications for real-world deployment of interaction-aware autonomous vehicles. We detail decision-making calibration and real-time implementation (CasADi/IPOPT) and propose deployment guardrails - minimum surrogate-safety margins, deadlock prevention - to balance efficiency with safety.