A comparative study of state-of-the-art driving strategies for autonomous vehicles

Abstract The autonomous vehicle is regarded as a promising technology with the potential to reshape mobility and solve many traffic issues, such as accessibility, efficiency, convenience, and especially safety. Many previous studies on driving strategies mainly focused on the low-level detailed driving behaviors or specific traffic scenarios but lacked the high-level driving strategy studies. Though researchers showed increasing interest in driving strategies, there still has no comprehensive answer on how to proactively implement safe driving. After analyzing several representative driving strategies, we propose three characteristic dimensions that are important to measure driving strategies: preferred objective, risk appetite, and collaborative manner. According to these three characteristic dimensions, we categorize existing driving strategies of autonomous vehicles into four kinds: defensive driving strategies, competitive driving strategies, negotiated driving strategies, and cooperative driving strategies. This paper provides a timely comparative review of these four strategies and highlights the possible directions for improving the high-level driving strategy design.