Occlusion-Aware Autonomous Highway Driving : Tracking safe velocity bounds on potential hidden traffic for improved trajectory planning

Sammanfattning: In order to reach higher levels of autonomy in autonomous driving, it is important to consider potential occluded traffic participants. Current research has considered occlusion-aware autonomous driving in urban situations. However, no implementations have shown good performance in high velocity situations such as highway driving yet, since the current methods are too conservative in these situations and result in frequent excessive braking. In this work a method is proposed that tracks boundaries on the velocity states of potential hidden traffic using reachability analysis. It is proven that the method can guarantee collision-free trajectories for any, potentially hidden, traffic. The method is evaluated on cut-in scenarios retrieved from a dataset of recorded traffic. The results show that tracking the velocity bounds for potentially hidden traffic results in more efficient trajectories up to 18 km/h faster compared to existing occlusion-aware methods. While the method shows clear improvements, it does not always manage to establish a velocity bound and at times excessive braking still occurs. Further work is thus necessary to ensure consistently well-performing occlusion-aware highway driving.