Agent Architecture for Adaptive Behaviors in Autonomous Driving

• Main Authors: Mauro Da Lio, Riccardo Dona, Gastone Pietro Rosati Papini, Kevin Gurney
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Adaptive behaviour; affordance competition hypothesis; autonomous driving; explainable artificial intelligence
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9133080/

Evolution has endowed animals with outstanding adaptive behaviours which are grounded in the organization of their sensorimotor system. This paper uses inspiration from these principles of organization in the design of an artificial agent for autonomous driving. After distilling the relevant principles from biology, their functional role in the implementation of an artificial system are explained. The resulting Agent, developed in an EU H2020 Research and Innovation Action, is used to concretely demonstrate the emergence of adaptive behaviour with a significant level of autonomy. Guidelines to adapt the same principled organization of the sensorimotor system to other agents for driving are also obtained. The demonstration of the system abilities is given with example scenarios and open access simulation tools. Prospective developments concerning learning via mental imagery are finally discussed.