Collaborative Decision-Making Using Spatiotemporal Graphs in Connected Autonomy

Collaborative decision-making is an essential ca- pability for multi-robot systems, such as connected vehicles, to collaboratively control autonomous vehicles in accident-prone scenarios. Under limited communication bandwidth, capturing comprehensive situational awareness by integrating connected agents’ observation is very challenging. In this paper, we pro- pose a novel collaborative decision-making method that effi- ciently and effectively integrates collaborators’ representations to control the ego vehicle in accident-prone scenarios. Our ap- proach formulates collaborative decision-making as a classifica- tion problem. We first represent sequences of raw observations as spatiotemporal graphs, which significantly reduce the package size to share among connected vehicles. Then we design a novel spatiotemporal graph neural network based on heterogeneous graph learning, which analyzes spatial and temporal connections of objects in a unified way for collaborative decision-making. We evaluate our approach using a high-fidelity simulator that considers realistic traffic, communication bandwidth, and vehi- cle sensing among connected autonomous vehicles. The experi- mental results show that our representation achieves over 100x reduction in the shared data size that meets the requirements of communication bandwidth for connected autonomous driving. In addition, our approach achieves over 30% improvements in driving safety.