Parallel Multi-Hypothesis Algorithm for Criticality Estimation in Traffic and Collision Avoidance

Due to the current developments towards autonomous driving and vehicle active safety, there is an increasing necessity for algorithms that are able to perform complex criticality predictions in real-time. Being able to process multi-object traffic scenarios aids the implementation of a variety of automotive applications such as driver assistance systems for collision prevention and mitigation as well as fall-back systems for autonomous vehicles. We present a fully model-based algorithm with a parallelizable architecture. The proposed algorithm can evaluate the criticality of complex, multi-modal (vehicles and pedestrians) traffic scenarios by simulating millions of trajectory combinations and detecting collisions between objects. The algorithm is able to estimate upcoming criticality at very early stages, demonstrating its potential for vehicle safety-systems and autonomous driving applications. An implementation on an embedded system in a test vehicle proves in a prototypical manner the compatibility of the algorithm with the hardware possibilities of modern cars. For a complex traffic scenario with 11 dynamic objects, more than 86 million pose combinations are evaluated in 21 ms on the GPU of a Drive PX~2

Auto-sapiens autonomous driving vehicle

This paper presents the Auto-Sapiens project, an autonomous driving car developed by the Mechatronics and Vehicle Dynamics Lab, at Sapienza University of Rome. Auto-Sapiens is a technological platform to test and improve innovative control algorithms. The car platform is a standard car (Smart ForTwo) equipped with throttle, brake, steering actuators and different sensors for attitude identification and environment reconstruction. The first experiments of the Auto-Sapiens car test a new obstacle avoidance. The vehicle, controlled by an optimal variational feedback control, recently developed by the authors, includes the nonlinearities inherent in the car dynamics for better performances. Results show the effectiveness of the system in terms of safety and robustness of the avoidance maneuvers

Towards Safe and Sustainable Autonomous Vehicles Using Environmentally-Friendly Criticality Metrics

This paper presents a mathematical analysis of several criticality metrics used for evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and also proposes novel environmentally-friendly metrics with the scope of facilitating their selection by future researchers who want to evaluate both safety and the environmental impact of AVs. Regarding this, first, we investigate whether the criticality metrics which are used to quantify the severeness of critical situations in autonomous driving are well-defined and work as intended. In some cases, the well-definedness or the intendedness of the metrics will be apparent, but in other cases, we will present mathematical demonstrations of these properties as well as alternative novel formulas. Additionally, we also present details regarding optimality. Secondly, we propose several novel environmentally-friendly metrics as well as a novel environmentally-friendly criticality metric that combines the safety and environmental impact in a car-following scenario. Third, we discuss the possibility of applying these criticality metrics in artificial intelligence (AI) training such as reinforcement learning (RL) where they can be used as penalty terms such as negative reward components. Finally, we propose a way to apply some of the metrics in a simple car-following scenario and show in our simulation that AVs powered by petrol emitted the most carbon emissions (54.92 g of CO2), being followed closely by diesel-powered AVs (54.67 g of CO2) and then by grid-electricity-powered AVs (31.16 g of CO2). Meanwhile, the AVs powered by electricity from a green source, such as solar energy, had 0 g of CO2 emissions, encouraging future researchers and the industry to develop more actively sustainable methods and metrics for powering and evaluating the safety and environmental impact of AVs using green energy