Robotics: Science and Systems XVII

Inferring Objectives in Continuous Dynamic Games from Noise-Corrupted Partial State Observations

Lasse Peters, David Fridovich-Keil, Vicenç Rubies-Royo, Claire Tomlin, Cyrill Stachniss

Abstract:

Robots and autonomous systems must interact with one another and their environment to provide high-quality services to their users. Dynamic game theory provides an expressive theoretical framework for modeling scenarios involving multiple agents with differing objectives interacting over time. A core challenge when formulating a dynamic game is designing objectives for each agent that capture desired behavior. In this paper; we propose a method for inferring parametric objective models of multiple agents based on observed interactions. Our inverse game solver jointly optimizes player objectives and continuous-state estimates by coupling them through Nash equilibrium constraints. Hence; our method is able to directly maximize the observation likelihood rather than other non-probabilistic surrogate criteria. Our method does not require full observations of game states or player strategies to identify player objectives. Instead; it robustly recovers this information from noisy; partial state observations. As a byproduct of estimating player objectives; our method computes a Nash equilibrium trajectory corresponding to those objectives. Thus; it is suitable for downstream trajectory forecasting tasks. We demonstrate our method in several simulated traffic scenarios. Results show that it reliably estimates player objectives from a short sequence of noise-corrupted partial state observations. Furthermore; using the estimated objectives; our method makes accurate predictions of each player's trajectory.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Peters-RSS-21, 
    AUTHOR    = {Lasse Peters AND David Fridovich-Keil AND Vicenç Rubies-Royo AND Claire Tomlin AND Cyrill Stachniss}, 
    TITLE     = {{Inferring Objectives in Continuous Dynamic Games from Noise-Corrupted Partial State Observations}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2021}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Virtual}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2021.XVII.030} 
}