Value Sensitive Design for Autonomous Vehicle Motion Planning

Human drivers navigate the roadways by balancing values such as safety, legality, and mobility. The public will likely judge an autonomous vehicle by similar values. The iterative methodology of value sensitive design formalizes the connection of human values to engineering specifications. We apply a modified value sensitive design methodology to the development of an autonomous vehicle speed control algorithm to safely navigate an occluded pedestrian crosswalk. The first iteration presented here models the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process and uses dynamic programming to compute an optimal policy to control the longitudinal acceleration of the vehicle based on the belief of a pedestrian crossing. The speed control algorithm is then tested in real-time on an experimental vehicle on a closed road course.