Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS RESEARCH
Volume 39, Issue 10-11, Pages 1326-1345Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0278364920950795
Keywords
Probabilistic planning; safety-preserving controller; backward reachability analysis; vehicle model predictive control; human-robot interaction
Categories
Funding
- Office of Naval Research [N00014-17-1-2433]
- Qualcomm
- Toyota Research Institute (``TRI'')
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Action anticipation, intent prediction, and proactive behavior are all desirable characteristics for autonomous driving policies in interactive scenarios. Paramount, however, is ensuring safety on the road: a key challenge in doing so is accounting for uncertainty in human driver actions without unduly impacting planner performance. This article introduces a minimally interventional safety controller operating within an autonomous vehicle control stack with the role of ensuring collision-free interaction with an externally controlled (e.g., human-driven) counterpart while respecting static obstacles such as a road boundary wall. We leverage reachability analysis to construct a real-time (100 Hz) controller that serves the dual role of (i) tracking an input trajectory from a higher-level planning algorithm using model predictive control, and (ii) assuring safety by maintaining the availability of a collision-free escape maneuver as a persistent constraint regardless of whatever future actions the other car takes. A full-scale steer-by-wire platform is used to conduct traffic-weaving experiments wherein two cars, initially side-by-side, must swap lanes in a limited amount of time and distance, emulating cars merging onto/off of a highway. We demonstrate that, with our control stack, the autonomous vehicle is able to avoid collision even when the other car defies the planner's expectations and takes dangerous actions, either carelessly or with the intent to collide, and otherwise deviates minimally from the planned trajectory to the extent required to maintain safety.
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