Game-theoretic Objective Space Planning

Autonomous Racing awards agents that react to opponents' behaviors with agile maneuvers towards progressing along the track while penalizing both over-aggressive and over-conservative agents. Understanding the intent of other agents is crucial to deploying autonomous systems in adversarial multi-agent environments. Current approaches either oversimplify the discretization of the action space of agents or fail to recognize the long-term effect of actions and become myopic. Our work focuses on addressing these two challenges. First, we propose a novel dimension reduction method that encapsulates diverse agent behaviors while conserving the continuity of agent actions. Second, we formulate the two-agent racing game as a regret minimization problem and provide a solution for tractable counterfactual regret minimization with a regret prediction model. Finally, we validate our findings experimentally on scaled autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate that using the proposed game-theoretic planner using agent characterization with the objective space significantly improves the win rate against different opponents, and the improvement is transferable to unseen opponents in an unseen environment.Comment: Submitted to 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023