Ethical decision making for autonomous vehicles
Nelson de Moura, Raja Chatila, Katherine Evans, Stéphane Chauvier, Ebru DOĞAN
Abstract
We address ethical dilemma situations that may arise during autonomous driving. To evaluate how this deliberation could work, we propose a decision-making algorithm based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) which controls the vehicle in normal conditions. When a dilemma situation is detected, the collision severity is determined by an evaluation of the harm incurred by different types of road users. Then, to illustrate different moral approaches, three different policies are proposed: one based on ralwsian contractarianism, another on utilitarianism, and finally on egalitarianism. Each policy supports a different view of the concept of fairness, potentially producing different behaviors for the same dilemma situation.