Vehicle Trajectory Collision Checks for Emergency Maneuver Planning
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Solution Overview
Problem
Real-time prediction of actions by drivers and pedestrians is challenging for semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicles, particularly when they break traffic rules, leading to unsafe behavior due to either overly cautious or optimistic predictions.
Innovation Solution
The system generates a vehicle trajectory, detects objects, and performs a collision check by determining the intersection of vehicle and object trajectories, allowing for emergency maneuvers like accelerate-and-veer or cautious maneuvers based on the collision check results, ensuring safe operation without exponential complexity.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the system performs comprehensive collision checks with multiple possible object trajectories, then safety is improved, but computational complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the trajectory prediction problem by generating multiple discrete possible trajectories for each detected object rather than computing all continuous possibilities. This segmentation allows the collision check to evaluate a manageable set of representative trajectories (e.g., current trajectory, left turn, right turn, acceleration, deceleration) while still capturing worst-case scenarios, thus improving safety without exponential computational complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary action by pre-generating a set of plausible object trajectories based on detected object characteristics and environmental context before executing the collision check. This preliminary trajectory generation step filters out impossible or highly unlikely paths, reducing the computational burden of the subsequent collision evaluation while ensuring that safety-critical trajectories are included in the assessment
2Reliability
If the system generates multiple emergency maneuvers dynamically, then collision avoidance capability is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies dynamics by generating emergency maneuvers that are dynamically adapted to the specific collision scenario rather than using fixed pre-programmed responses. The maneuver generation process dynamically adjusts parameters such as steering angle, acceleration, and braking force based on the relative positions, velocities, and trajectories of the vehicle and detected objects, optimizing collision avoidance while maintaining reasonable processing time through efficient numerical optimization
3Measurement precision
If the system performs detailed collision checks with multiple trajectories, then prediction accuracy is improved, but real-time performance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by performing detailed collision checks selectively for specific trajectory segments and objects rather than uniformly across all possible trajectories. The collision evaluation focuses computational resources on critical regions where collisions are most likely to occur or would be most severe, based on object proximity, relative velocity, and trajectory convergence, thereby maintaining high prediction accuracy for critical scenarios while preserving real-time performance
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods for operating a vehicle. The methods comprise: generating, by a computing device, a vehicle trajectory for the vehicle that is in motion; detecting an object within a given distance from the vehicle; generating, by the computing device, at least one possible object trajectory for the object which was detected; performing, by the computing device, a collision check to determine that there remains time to react safely to worst-case behavior by the object (the collision check being based on the vehicle trajectory and at least one possible object trajectory); and performing operations, by the computing device, to selectively cause the vehicle to perform an emergency maneuver based on results of the collision check.