Design of Driver-Assist Systems Under Probabilistic Safety Specifications Near Stop Signs

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing in-vehicle driver-assist systems that warn or override the driver to prevent collisions with a guaranteed probability. The probabilistic nature of the problem naturally arises from many sources of uncertainty, among which the behavior of the surrou...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: McNew, John M., Forghani Oozroody, Mojtaba, Hoehener, Daniel Andreas, Del Vecchio, Domitilla
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108155
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8695-1891
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1866-6970
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6472-8576
Description
Summary:In this paper, we consider the problem of designing in-vehicle driver-assist systems that warn or override the driver to prevent collisions with a guaranteed probability. The probabilistic nature of the problem naturally arises from many sources of uncertainty, among which the behavior of the surrounding vehicles and the response of the driver to on-board warnings. We formulate this problem as a control problem for uncertain systems under probabilistic safety specifications and leverage the structure of the application domain to reach computationally efficient implementations. Simulations using a naturalistic data set show that the empirical probability of safety is always within 5% of the theoretical value in the case of direct driver override. In the case of on-board warnings, the empirical value is more conservative due primarily to drivers decelerating more strongly than requested. However, the empirical value is greater than or equal to the theoretical value, demonstrating a clear safety benefit.