Introducing the transitional autonomous vehicle lane-changing dataset: Empirical Experiments

This paper presents the North Carolina Transitional Autonomous Vehicle Lane-Changing (NC-tALC) dataset and uses it to characterize mandatory lane-changing behavior of transitional automated vehicles (tAVs). It quantifies the evolution of lead--lag gaps throughout the lane-change process and examines how potential collision risk develops during the maneuver. A controlled field experiment comprising 78 mandatory lane-change trials was conducted on a public roadway in Apex, North Carolina. Four instrumented vehicles created repeatable traffic conditions while varying the lane changer's initial position within the candidate target gap. High-resolution RTK-GNSS/INS trajectories were processed to identify key timestamps, calculate lead, lag, and lane-change gaps, and estimate interactions using time-gap- and speed-based surrogate safety measures. Despite substantial differences in initial conditions, lead and lag gaps consistently converged toward a relatively narrow range near lane crossing. Potential collision risk increased as the maneuver progressed, peaked near physical lane entry, and was dominated by interactions with the target-lane leader. Lane-change completion did not necessarily coincide with the disappearance of collision risk. This study provides one of the first controlled empirical characterizations of the complete mandatory lane-change process of tAVs using repeatable public-road experiments. The NC-tALC dataset supports analysis of behavioral and safety evolution throughout the maneuver rather than only at the gap-acceptance instant. The dataset and findings provide empirical benchmarks for evaluating automated lane-changing behavior, calibrating behavioral models, and validating simulation and safety assessment methods for mandatory lane-change scenarios.

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) perception systems require more than simply seeing, via e.g., object detection or scene segmentation. They need a holistic understanding of what is happening within the scene for safe interaction with other road users. Few datasets exist for the purpose of developing and training algorithms to comprehend the actions of other road users. This paper presents ROAD-Waymo, an extensive dataset for the development and benchmarking of techniques for agent, action, location and event detection in road scenes, provided as a layer upon the (US) Waymo Open dataset. Considerably larger and more challenging than any existing dataset (and encompassing multiple cities), it comes with 198k annotated video frames, 54k agent tubes, 3.9M bounding boxes and a total of 12.4M labels. The integrity of the dataset has been confirmed and enhanced via a novel annotation pipeline designed for automatically identifying violations of requirements specifically designed for this dataset. As ROAD-Waymo is compatible with the original (UK) ROAD dataset, it provides the opportunity to tackle domain adaptation between real-world road scenarios in different countries within a novel benchmark: ROAD++.

Driving interaction data are important for training and evaluating autonomous drivingVision-Language-Action (VLA) models, but existing datasets contain limited denseinteraction samples and weak alignment between trajectories, visual inputs, and languageannotations. This work presents the Interactive Enhanced Driving Dataset (IEDD), alarge-scale interaction-oriented dataset constructed from five naturalistic trajectory datasets:Lyft Level 5, Waymo, nuPlan, INTERACTION, and SIND. IEDD contains 7.31 millionego-centric interaction segments, including 6.66 million multi agents cases, covering head-on,car-following, merging, and crossing interactions. Each segment is associated withtrajectory-derived interaction metrics describing interaction intensity and efficiency. Based onthese annotations, IEDD-VQA further provides trajectory-reconstructed BEV videos,structured interaction semantics, and multi-turn question-answer pairs. The dataset cansupport interaction mining, long-tail scenario analysis, VLA instruction tuning, andhierarchical evaluation of perception, behavior description, physical quantification, andcounterfactual reasoning.