An LSTM-Based Autonomous Driving Model Using a Waymo Open Dataset

The Waymo Open Dataset has been released recently, providing a platform to crowdsource some fundamental challenges for automated vehicles (AVs), such as 3D detection and tracking. While the dataset provides a large amount of high-quality and multi-source driving information, people in academia are more interested in the underlying driving policy programmed in Waymo self-driving cars, which is inaccessible due to AV manufacturers’ proprietary protection. Accordingly, academic researchers have to make various assumptions to implement AV components in their models or simulations, which may not represent the realistic interactions in real-world traffic. Thus, this paper introduces an approach to learn a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based model for imitating the behavior of Waymo’s self-driving model. The proposed model has been evaluated based on Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The experimental results show that our model outperforms several baseline models in driving action prediction. In addition, a visualization tool is presented for verifying the performance of the model.