Autonomous vehicle planning

• Main Authors: Albrecht, Stefano, Antolin, Roberto, Antonello, Morris, Eiras, Francisco, Ramamoorthy, Subramanian, Lyons, Simon, Dobre, Mihai, Penkov, Svetlin Valentinov
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 13.02.2024
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTER SYSTEMS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS; COMPUTING; CONJOINT CONTROL OF VEHICLE SUB-UNITS OF DIFFERENT TYPE ORDIFFERENT FUNCTION; CONTROL OR REGULATING SYSTEMS IN GENERAL; CONTROL SYSTEMS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR HYBRID VEHICLES; CONTROLLING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; ELECTRICITY; FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS OF SUCH SYSTEMS; IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL; MONITORING OR TESTING ARRANGEMENTS FOR SUCH SYSTEMS ORELEMENTS; PERFORMING OPERATIONS; PHYSICS; PICTORIAL COMMUNICATION, e.g. TELEVISION; REGULATING; ROAD VEHICLE DRIVE CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR PURPOSES NOT RELATED TOTHE CONTROL OF A PARTICULAR SUB-UNIT; SIGNALLING; TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS; TRANSPORTING; VEHICLES IN GENERAL

An autonomous vehicle (AV) planning method comprises: receiving sensor inputs pertaining to an AV; processing the AV sensor inputs to determine an encountered driving scenario; in an AV planner, executing a tree search algorithm to determine a sequence of AV manoeuvres corresponding to a path through a constructed game tree; and generating AV control signals for executing the determined sequence of AV manoeuvres; wherein the game tree has a plurality of nodes representing anticipated states of the encountered driving scenario, and the anticipated driving scenario state of each child node is determined by updating the driving scenario state of its parent node based on (i) a candidate AV manoeuvre and (ii) an anticipated behaviour of at least one external agent in the encountered driving scenario.