LEARNING BASED SPEED PLANNER FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING VEHICLES

A learning based speed planner for autonomous driving vehicles (ADV) is disclosed. An ADV is set into human-driving mode. Driving control elements are under control of a human driver, and other ADV logic is enabled. The ADV plans a route path on a segment of the route having an obstacle. ADV logic generates a station-time graph for the path of the segment, and a grid of cells to encompass the path and obstacle. A feature vector is generated from the grid. Human driving behavior is recorded as the ADV is navigated along the path. Recorded driving data for a large plurality of paths, obstacles and ADVs is transmitted to a server to generate a speed model. The speed model is downloaded to one or more ADVs for use in autonomous driving mode, to determine an initial speed to use in similar driving situations.