Controlled Experiments on Lane Changing by Transitional Autonomous Vehicle: Dataset and Behavioral Insights
Authors: Abhinav Sharma, Md Abdullah Al Hasan, Danjue Chen, George F. List
Organizations: Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695, USA · Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State2026 University Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
Abstract
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 vehicles (AVs) are widely known to follow conservative, rule-based motion policies that surrounding drivers can learn to anticipate. A direct consequence is that human drivers may accept shorter longitudinal gaps when cutting in front of an AV than when targeting another human-driven vehicle (HDV). We test this hypothesis using the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD), which provides 25,906 real-world highway scenarios at 10 hertz. An eight-criterion lane-change detector extracts 706 HDV-to-AV and 3,172 HDV-to-HDV cut-in events from the same traffic environment. The median accepted gap in front of the Waymo AV is 7.58 meters versus 9.57 meters for HDV targets, a 1.99 meter reduction that is statistically significant (p equals 5.76 times 10 to the negative eighth power, d equals negative 0.224) and persists under speed-matched resampling. Cut-in speeds toward the AV are 37 percent higher (51.7 versus 37.7 kilometers per hour, d equals 0.502), and 68.0 percent of AV-targeted cut-ins occur below the 10 meter gap boundary versus 51.8 percent of HDV-targeted events (chi-squared equals 60.5, p is less than 10 to the negative thirteenth power). These results reveal a systematic and safety-relevant asymmetry in human gap-acceptance behavior that warrants AV-specific calibration of both motion-planning safety envelopes and traffic simulation models.
Transfer learning improves policy learning efficiency by reusing knowledge from source tasks, providing a feasible paradigm for safe and efficient autonomous highway lane changing decision-making. Existing methods frequently encounter transfer mismatch induced by distribution shifts between source and target domains, leading to training oscillation and performance decline. Besides, target domain adaptation depends on exploratory interactions, which struggles to guarantee training safety in safety-critical lane changing cases. To tackle these limitations, this paper proposes a safe transfer reinforcement learning framework for autonomous highway lane changing. First, we design an adaptive teacher intervention mechanism based on instantaneous safety cost to restrain risky exploration and fade intervention strength progressively, with theoretical analysis on return bounds for mixed behavior policy. This intervention also produces dual-source samples for joint training. Second, a teacher-guided safe transfer module embeds action evaluation information of teacher policy into student learning via reward shaping to boost training safety and efficiency, with teacher guidance decaying as policy safety rises. Third, a teacher-guided weighted optimization mechanism adjusts sample weights in policy optimization using a likelihood ratio factor to stabilize transfer performance. Experiments under varied traffic densities and validations on real-world NGSIM dataset reveal that our method surpasses baseline approaches by over 52.2% in safety and 5.0% in learning efficiency. Results verify the efficacy and robustness of our safety-aware transfer strategy for autonomous highway lane changing under various traffic conditions.
We present NOVA, an autonomous symbolic regression framework that identifies interpretable car-following and lane-change structures from raw trajectory data with minimal behavioral priors. Applied to 4,765,788 active driving observations from the NGSIM I-80 and US-101 datasets, NOVA's deterministic Rust-powered search engine evaluates over 10,000 candidate algebraic structures and identifies a compact two-term acceleration model under a forward-shifted rolling-mean prediction target. Evaluated under two complementary preprocessing pipelines, NOVA achieves RMSE=1.376m/s2 (R2=15.57%) on the intent-forecasting benchmark, outperforming the best recalibrated symbolic-regression baseline (SR-LLM, PNAS~2025) by 0.135 m/s2 in RMSE under an identical evaluation protocol. Across eight independent experiments, a single dominant nonlinear term emerges as a robust backbone of human car-following; a residual-guided extension further links the selected structure to an established psychophysical theory of collision avoidance. The discovered feature operators transfer zero-shot between freeway sites with under 3 pp R2 loss. Extended to lane-change modelling within a multinomial logit framework, NOVA achieves 67.4% balanced accuracy under strict vehicle-ID holdout on 502 unseen drivers, surpassing existing lane-changing baselines by +29.8 percentage points on a three-class problem.
Ishak Abassi, Nassim Ali Bouazzouni, Farah Ibelaiden +1