Highly Automated Driving on Highways Based on Legal Safety

This paper discusses driving system design based on traffic rules. This allows fully automated driving in an environment with human drivers, without necessarily changing equipment on other vehicles or infrastructure. It also facilitates cooperation between the driving system and the host driver during highly automated driving. The concept, referred to as legal safety, is illustrated for highly automated driving on highways with distance keeping, intelligent speed adaptation, and lane-changing functionalities. Requirements by legal safety on perception and control components are discussed. This paper presents the actual design of a legal safety decision component, which predicts object trajectories and calculates optimal subject trajectories. System implementation on automotive electronic control units and results on vehicle and simulator are discussed.

I. Introduction

Vehicle automation is proposed as one of the solutions that will make transport safer, more comfortable, and more environmentally friendly [1]. Autonomous driving can currently be demonstrated, with highly equipped vehicles under human supervision. The VaMoRs experience [2], ARGO experience [3], Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenges [4], CyberCar [5], CityMobil [6], and CityNetMobil [7] demonstrations presented autonomous vehicles on dedicated infrastructure, with limited interaction with other vehicles. Recently, promising results on automated driving on public roads have been shown by the VisLab and Google teams [8], [9].