Pre-generating Alternative Routes for Autonomous Vehicle Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Autonomous vehicles face challenges in navigating safely through dynamically changing environments, such as road closures or traffic congestion, as they often require time to generate new routes, which can lead to unsafe conditions or inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a system that pre-generates alternative routes for an autonomous vehicle's initial route, allowing it to seamlessly switch to a different path when encountering exceptions, using sensor data and networked communication to ensure safe and efficient navigation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If the autonomous vehicle generates new routes in real-time when encountering road closures or traffic congestion, then the vehicle can adapt to environmental changes, but the time required for route generation may lead to unsafe conditions or delays
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-generates multiple alternative routes in advance before the autonomous vehicle encounters any exceptions. These alternative routes are calculated and stored ahead of time, so when an exception occurs (road closure, congestion), the vehicle can immediately switch to a pre-computed alternative route without spending time generating a new one, thus resolving the time loss while maintaining adaptability
2Speed
If the system pre-generates multiple alternative routes, then the vehicle can quickly switch to alternative routes when exceptions occur, but the complexity of the route planning system increases
Solution Approach 1:
The route planning system is segmented into modular components: exception detection module, alternative route generation module, and route selection module. Each module handles a specific task independently, which simplifies the overall system architecture while enabling fast route switching through coordinated operation of these segmented components
3Device complexity
If the autonomous vehicle uses a single initial route, then the route planning system is simple, but the vehicle cannot adapt to dynamically changing environments
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple alternative routes are pre-generated and stored in the system memory before the vehicle encounters any exceptions. This preliminary preparation ensures that when environmental changes occur, the vehicle has multiple validated route options already available, improving reliability and safety without requiring complex real-time decision-making
Solution Approach 2:
The system continuously monitors environmental conditions through sensor data and compares actual conditions with the planned route conditions. When exceptions are detected, the feedback mechanism triggers automatic selection of alternative routes, creating a closed-loop control system that maintains safety while managing complexity through intelligent response to environmental feedback
Data Source
AI summary
Technologies are disclosed that determine when alternative routes are to be pre-generated for a vehicle. A route planning system receives a request for a navigation route for a vehicle. The navigation route is generated, where the navigation route includes navigation nodes. For a given navigation node, a corresponding weight and/or a probability of an exception event occurring are determined, and are used to determine whether to generate an alternate route configured to be utilized in response to a future detection by the vehicle of an exception event associated with the given node. The route planning system may then generate alternate routes accordingly, and may transmit the navigation route and an alternate route for a corresponding given node to the vehicle. The navigation route may be used to navigate the vehicle, and the alternate route may be used to navigate the vehicle if an exception event is detected.