Prescribed Performance Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning for Roundabout Navigation of Autonomous Vehicles

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) face significant challenges in roundabout navigation due to dense traffic interactions and unpredictable agent behaviors, necessitating high levels of adaptability and safety. While the combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers a promising approach, existing frameworks suffer from a structural mismatch where pointwise RL decisions fail to align with MPC's trajectory level optimization, and often lack rigorous safety guarantees. This work proposes RLTrajGen-PPMPC-CBF, a hierarchical framework for safe, smooth and comfort roundabout navigation, which regulates the coupling between RL-based planning and MPC-based control. We employ Prescribed Performance Constraints (PPC) to enforce a gradual, stable convergence between reference trajectories and control outputs, ensuring MPC tracking performance remains consistent with intended behavior from RL. Additionally, a Control Barrier Function (CBF) layer provides real-time safety corrections that are fed back into the RL process. Simulation results in the MetaDrive environment demonstrate that our method achieves a 6.25% increase in average success rate and a 65.87% reduction in Motion Sickness Dose Value (MSDV) compared to the optimal baseline, meanwhile accelerating training convergence.