The computational effort of trajectory planning for automated vehicles often increases with the complexity of the traffic situation. This is particularly problematic in safety-critical situations, in which the vehicle must react in a timely manner. We present a novel motion planning approach for automated vehicles, which combines set-based reachability analysis with convex optimization to address this issue. This combination makes it possible to find driving maneuvers even in small and convoluted solution spaces. In contrast to existing work, the computation time of our approach typically decreases, the more complex situations become. We demonstrate the benefits of our motion planner in scenarios from the CommonRoad benchmark suite and validate the approach on a real test vehicle.

Ensuring that autonomous vehicles do not cause accidents remains a challenge. We present a formal verification technique for guaranteeing legal safety in arbitrary urban traffic situations. Legal safety means that autonomous vehicles never cause accidents although other traffic participants are allowed to perform any behaviour in accordance with traffic rules. Our technique serves as a safety layer for existing motion planning frameworks that provide intended trajectories for autonomous vehicles. We verify whether intended trajectories comply with legal safety and provide fallback solutions in safety-critical situations. The benefits of our verification technique are demonstrated in critical urban scenarios, which have been recorded in real traffic. The autonomous vehicle executed only safe trajectories, even when using an intended trajectory planner that was not aware of other traffic participants. Our results indicate that our online verification technique can drastically reduce the number of traffic accidents.

Collision avoidance, kinematic feasibility, and road-compliance must be validated to ensure the drivability of planned motions for autonomous vehicles. Although these tasks are highly repetitive, computationally efficient toolboxes are still unavailable. The CommonRoad Drivability Checker - an open-source toolbox - unifies these mentioned checks. It is compatible with the CommonRoad benchmark suite, which additionally facilitates the development of motion planners. Our toolbox drastically reduces the effort of developing and validating motion planning algorithms. Numerical experiments show that our toolbox is real-time capable and can be used in real test vehicles.