Back-Propagating Intersection Collision Avoidance System

The patent extracts and focuses only on the essential elements needed for collision detection: vehicle positions, velocities, and accelerations. By removing unnecessary factors such as absolute position determination systems, lane information processing, weather condition analysis, and accident condition evaluation, the system achieves collision prevention with significantly reduced complexity, using only basic vehicle state data and geometric calculations.

The patent segments the collision avoidance problem into independent computational steps: (1) calculating predicted positions of vehicles at future time steps, (2) determining collision zones based on vehicle dimensions and predicted positions, (3) identifying capture sets that guarantee entry into collision zones, and (4) computing evasive maneuvers. This segmentation allows each step to be processed independently with simple algorithms, avoiding the need for complex integrated analysis.

The patent applies partial action by calculating vehicle positions and collision zones only at discrete future time steps rather than continuously, and by using simplified geometric models for collision zone determination. This partial computation approach maintains sufficient collision detection accuracy while dramatically improving computational efficiency and enabling real-time response on standard vehicle processors.

The patent uses disposable, lightweight computational models that can be quickly recalculated. Instead of maintaining complex persistent models of road geometry, weather conditions, and vehicle dynamics, the system uses simple point-based vehicle representations and basic kinematic equations that can be recomputed rapidly from current sensor data, achieving both accuracy and computational efficiency.