Fail-Safe Motion Planning of Autonomous Vehicles

Authors

Silvia Magdici, Matthias Althoff

Year

2016

Conference Paper

Source

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Identifiers

DOI 10.1109/ITSC.2016.7795594

Abstract¶

Formally verified methods for motion planning are required in order to guarantee safety for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we consider trajectory generation by considering the most probable trajectory of other traffic participants. However, if the surrounding vehicles perform unexpected maneuvers, a collision might be inevitable. In this paper, a fail-safe motion planner is developed, which generates optimal trajectories, yet guarantees safety at all times. Safety is achieved by maintaining an emergency maneuver which can safely bring the host vehicle to a stop while avoiding any collision. The emergency maneuver is computed by considering for a given time horizon the occupancy prediction which encloses all possible trajectories of the other traffic participants. The performance of the approach is evaluated through simulation against real traffic data.

Summary¶

Introduces a planning architecture that keeps an emergency stop maneuver available while optimizing nominal vehicle motion. Its main value is the explicit pairing of performance-oriented trajectory generation with occupancy-based safety envelopes for unexpected traffic behavior.