CoDriveVLM: VLM-Enhanced Urban Cooperative Dispatching and Motion Planning for Future Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems

The increasing demand for flexible and efficient urban transportation solutions has spotlighted the limitations of traditional Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) systems, particularly in accommodating diverse passenger needs and dynamic urban environments. Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems have emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to provide responsive and adaptable services. However, existing methods primarily focus on either vehicle scheduling or path planning, which often simplify complex urban layouts and neglect the necessity for simultaneous coordination and mutual avoidance among CAVs. This oversimplification poses significant challenges to the deployment of AMoD systems in real-world scenarios. To address these gaps, we propose CoDriveVLM, a novel framework that integrates high-fidelity simultaneous dispatching and cooperative motion planning for future AMoD systems. Our method harnesses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance multi-modality information processing, and this enables comprehensive dispatching and collision risk evaluation. The VLM-enhanced CAV dispatching coordinator is introduced to effectively manage complex and unforeseen AMoD conditions, thus supporting efficient scheduling decision-making. Furthermore, we propose a scalable decentralized cooperative motion planning method via consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) focusing on collision risk evaluation and decentralized trajectory optimization. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of CoDriveVLM in various traffic conditions, showcasing its potential to significantly improve the fidelity and effectiveness of AMoD systems in future urban transportation networks. The code is available at https://github.com/henryhcliu/CoDriveVLM.git.