Does Unpredictability Influence Driving Behavior?

In this paper we investigate the effect of the unpredictability of surrounding cars on an ego-car performing a driving maneuver. We use Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning to model reward functions for an ego-car conducting a lane change in a highway setting. We define a new feature based on the unpredictability of surrounding cars and use it in the reward function. We learn two reward functions from human data: a baseline and one that incorporates our defined unpredictability feature, then compare their performance with a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the unpredictability feature leads to a better fit of human-generated test data. These results encourage further investigation of the effect of unpredictability on driving behavior.