Probabilistic Risk Metrics for Navigating Occluded Intersections

Abstract

Among traffic accidents in the USA, 23% of fatal and 32% of non-fatal incidents occurred at intersections. For driver assistance systems, intersection navigation remains a difficult problem that is critically important to increasing driver safety. In this letter, we examine how to navigate an unsignalized intersection safely under occlusions and faulty perception. We propose a real-time, probabilistic, risk assessment for parallel autonomy control applications for occluded intersection scenarios. The algorithms are implemented on real hardware and are deployed in a variety of turning and merging topologies. We show phenomena that establish go/no-go decisions, augment acceleration through an intersection and encourage nudging behaviors toward intersections.