Typically, autonomous cars optimize for a combination of safety, efficiency,
and driving quality. But as we get better at this optimization, we start seeing
behavior go from too conservative to too aggressive. The car's behavior exposes
the incentives we provide in its cost function. In this work, we argue for cars
that are not optimizing a purely selfish cost, but also try to be courteous to
other interactive drivers. We formalize courtesy as a term in the objective
that measures the increase in another driver's cost induced by the autonomous
car's behavior. Such a courtesy term enables the robot car to be aware of
possible irrationality of the human behavior, and plan accordingly. We analyze
the effect of courtesy in a variety of scenarios. We find, for example, that
courteous robot cars leave more space when merging in front of a human driver.
Moreover, we find that such a courtesy term can help explain real human driver
behavior on the NGSIM dataset.

本研究提出自动驾驶汽车在优化行车安全、效率和质量的同时，需要考虑对互动驾驶人的礼貌及其对其他驾驶人造成的影响，并以此为目标进行优化。在多种场景下，礼貌的自动驾驶汽车能够更好地适应人类行为的不确定性，同时更好地解释真实的驾驶行为。