Patent ID: 8788134

Claim:
An autonomous driving merge management system comprising: an autonomous driving control device for autonomously controlling accelerations of a host vehicle; an intention decision management system comprising: a candidate strategy subsystem generating a plurality of candidate driving strategies, each candidate driving strategy being a potential driving strategy executable by the host vehicle; a merging vehicle behavior recognition subsystem predicting a merging intention of a merging vehicle; the merging intention relating to a positive acceleration or a negative acceleration of the merging vehicle; an intention-based interactive prediction subsystem predicting future merging scenarios between the host vehicle and merging vehicle as a function of inputs by the merging vehicle behavior recognition subsystem and inputs by the candidate strategy subsystem; a cost function-based evaluation subsystem determining a cost for each future merging scenario generated by the intention-based interactive prediction subsystem; and a processor for selecting a merge strategy of the host vehicle based on intention-based prediction results and cost function-based evaluation results; wherein the autonomous driving control device applies the merge strategy to the host vehicle for allowing the merging vehicle to cooperatively merge with the host vehicle.