Trajectory Prediction-Aided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicle Decision-Making at Unsignalized Intersections

Due to the absence of traffic signal control and the difficulty in accurately estimating the future movements of surrounding vehicles, autonomous vehicle decision-making faces challenges at unsignalized intersections. This study proposes a trajectory prediction-aided deep reinforcement learning framework. First, a composite prioritized replay mechanism is introduced into the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm, jointly considering temporal-difference error and reward-based event severity to enhance critical-experience reuse. Second, a convolutional multi-layer long short-term memory (CM-LSTM) model predicts surrounding-vehicle trajectories through convolutional local-motion encoding and stacked LSTM temporal modeling, and the predicted trajectories are incorporated into the deep reinforcement learning state representation. A multi-objective reward function is designed to balance collision avoidance, passing efficiency, lane keeping, and task completion. In CARLA go-straight and left-turn tests, CLS-TD3 achieves success rates of 93.8% and 90.2%, collision rates of 2.5% and 4.2%, and average passing times of 5.18 s and 5.58 s. Compared with TD3, the success rates increase by 6.3 and 8.6 percentage points, while average passing times decrease by 18.8% and 20.5%. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the safety and crossing efficiency of autonomous vehicle decision-making at unsignalized intersections.