How Far Ahead Should Autonomous Vehicles Start Resolving Predicted Conflicts? Exploring Uncertainty-Based Safety-Efficiency Trade-Off

Resolving predicted conflicts is vital for safe and efficient autonomous vehicles (AV). In practice, vehicular motion prediction faces inherent uncertainty due to heterogeneous driving behaviours and environments. This spatial uncertainty increases non-linearly with prediction time horizons, leading AVs to perceive more road space occupied by...

On the quantitative resilience assessment of complex engineered systems

Recent years have seen the increasing complexity of engineered systems. Complexity and uncertainty also exist in engineered systems’ interactions with human operators, managers, and the organization. Resilience, focusing on a system's ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and recover from disruptive situations, can provide an umbrella concept...

Probabilistic Risk Metric for Highway Driving Leveraging Multi-Modal Trajectory Predictions

Road traffic safety has attracted increasing research attention, in particular in the current transition from human-driven vehicles to autonomous vehicles. Surrogate measures of safety are widely used to assess traffic safety but they typically ignore motion uncertainties and are inflexible in dealing with two-dimensional motion. Meanwhile,...

Scenario-Based Trajectory Optimization in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by incorporating chance constraints into the planning problem. This problem is not suitable for online optimization...

Safe-by-Design: from Safety to Responsibility

Safe-by-design (SbD) aims at addressing safety issues already during the R&D and design phases of new technologies. SbD has increasingly become popular in the last few years for addressing the risks of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We ask to what extent SbD approaches can deal with uncertainty, in...