Human-centered driving authority allocation for driver-automation shared control: A two-layer game-theoretic approach

Shared control system (SCS) has become an effective approach to enhance driving safety and improve traffic flow efficiency, but desire the SCS to be accepted by the public requires a well-designed driving authority allocation strategy. This paper proposes a human-centered authority allocation strategy for the SCS under a novel two-layer game framework considering driver acceptance and traffic participant’s social behaviors. First, the noncooperative Nash game theory is used to model the interaction between the driver and trajectory-tracking controller, and the Nash equilibrium solution is derived. Then, several driver-in-the-loop (DIL) tests are conducted to analysis the characteristics of different driver acceptance and social behaviors in the use of the SCS. On this basis, the authority allocation problem of the SCS is formulated as a Stackelberg game optimization problem, which takes both the driver acceptance and the traffic participant’s social behaviors into consideration to improve the collaboration performance. Finally, the driver-automation interaction and vehicle-vehicle interaction are considered in an integrated manner to form a two-layer game problem for authority allocation. Four case studies are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed authority allocation strategy. The results show that the proposed strategy can adapt to different acceptance of human driver to controller intervention, while addressing different social interactions with surrounding traffic participants.