Elevation Plane Filtering for Vehicle Road Display
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Solution Overview
Problem
Autonomous vehicles face challenges in providing clear and non-alarming visual information to passengers about their surroundings, as existing systems often display all surrounding roads, including those intersecting or at different elevations, which can be confusing and overwhelming.
Innovation Solution
The system calculates a plane relative to the vehicle's orientation and determines distances between the vehicle and surrounding roads, selectively displaying only roads within a predefined distance, fading or removing roads that intersect or are far from the vehicle's plane to prevent confusion and alarm.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If all surrounding roads are displayed to provide complete environmental information, then information completeness is improved, but visual clarity and passenger understanding deteriorate due to confusion and overwhelming details
Solution Approach 1:
The display system segments road information by elevation planes, separating roads at different heights into distinct groups. Roads are divided into those on the same plane as the vehicle and those on different planes, allowing selective display based on relevance to the vehicle's current trajectory and reducing visual clutter while preserving important environmental information.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies different display qualities to different road segments based on their spatial relationship to the vehicle. Roads within a threshold distance on the same plane are displayed with full visibility and detail, while roads on different planes or beyond the threshold are faded or removed, creating a gradient of information prominence that enhances clarity without losing critical data.
2Reliability
If roads at different elevations are displayed to show complete surroundings, then environmental accuracy is improved, but passenger alarm and confusion increase due to intersecting road appearances
Solution Approach 1:
The system introduces elevation plane as an additional dimension for organizing and filtering road display information. By calculating the vehicle's plane based on its location, pitch, and yaw, and comparing road elevations to this plane, the system creates a three-dimensional understanding of the environment that is rendered in a two-dimensional display, allowing accurate representation without misleading intersections.
Solution Approach 2:
The system extracts and removes road segments that would create confusing intersections in the display. By identifying roads on different elevation planes and removing or fading them based on their distance from the vehicle's plane, the system eliminates the harmful visual effect of apparent intersections while maintaining accurate environmental representation through selective omission.
3Reliability
If detailed road information is provided to ensure safety, then safety monitoring is improved, but visual clutter increases reducing overall situational awareness
Solution Approach 1:
The display system dynamically adjusts road visibility based on the vehicle's current state including location, pitch, yaw, and speed. As the vehicle moves and changes orientation, the set of displayed roads updates automatically to reflect the current relevant environment, maintaining optimal information density and visual clarity throughout the journey while ensuring continuous safety monitoring of surrounding roads.
Data Source
AI summary
This technology relates to selectively providing details of surrounding roads to passengers of a vehicle. One or more computing devices may calculate a plane relative to an orientation of the vehicle based upon at least one of the vehicle's location, pitch, and yaw. For each surrounding road a distance between the surrounding road and the plane may be determined by the one or more computing devices. The one or more computing devices may generate and display a video indicating a projected trajectory of the vehicle and objects detected by sensors on the vehicle, on a map corresponding to a route the vehicle is currently following and virtual representations of surrounding roads which are within a predefined distance of the location of the vehicle based on the determined distance for each of the surrounding roads.