Quasi-critical collision-avoidance strategy for autonomous vehicles in complex traffic scenarios based on exclusive area of relative velocity vector algorithm

Abstract

Collision avoidance is one of the most important requirements for autonomous vehicles, particularly in complex and congested traffic scenarios where trajectories have little safety redundancy. However, simultaneously reaching the required accuracy and universal feasibility for different collision-avoidance behaviours is difficult due to the multi-state coupled motion of vehicles. To achieve the maximum traversability and ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles in any complex scenarios, we propose a quasi-critical collision-avoidance strategy based on a newly developed algorithm: the exclusive area-of-relative-velocity vector. This strategy first involves the construction of an exclusive area-of-velocity vector for each object vehicle to extract its position relative to the subject vehicle. In this procedure, to establish a subject-motion-decoupled scenario, projective transformation is applied to regularise the moving elliptical contour of the subject vehicle as a settled circle while retaining all positional relationships between the subject and object vehicles using the invariants. Subsequently, a group of escaping conditions for this exclusive area are established to express this quasi-critical collision-avoidance strategy explicitly and mathematically. The ultimate ability to escape from such an area is determined through theoretical derivations and experiments according to vehicle dynamics. In terms of real scenario data, a set of escaping equations is established to calculate the escaping conditions subject to the current state and the ultimate motion ability. Via scenario verifications, this strategy is shown to represent the safety boundary accurately and ensure quasi-critical collision-avoidance conditions under complex scenarios.