Traffic-Rule-Aware Reachability Analysis for Motion Planning of Automated Vehicles

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Matthias Althoff
• Subject Area: Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics ; Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513192618

Despite the importance of respecting traffic rules, most previous works on motion planning for autonomous vehicles ignore traffic rules or are not able to consider most of them. One of the reasons is that most traffic rules cannot be directly formulated as constraints for a motion planner. Exceptions exist, such as keeping the speed limit, but complicated rules require the formalization as temporal logic formulas. So far, there is no approach that can exactly or approximately rewrite temporal logic formulas as constraints so that they can be directly used in optimization-based motion planning algorithms. Our proposal addresses exactly this open research problem. We will develop novel methods to rewrite temporal logic formulas so that they can be efficiently used in motion planners. Furthermore, we will develop for the first time methods to compute reachable sets that consider traffic rules. This will enable us to develop essentially new methods for the co-design of reachability analysis and motion planning considering traffic rules. We expect that with our novel approach, traffic-rule-compliant motion plans will be obtained the faster, the more critical the situation is. In addition, we will automatically ignore less important traffic rules in order to ensure the compliance with more important rules in critical situations. We will demonstrate our approach not only in simulation, but also with our new research vehicle EDGAR, which has been partially financed by a DFG Major Research Instrumentation grant .

• DFG Programme: Research Grants