Importance Filtering with Risk Models for Complex Driving Situations
This work addresses computational efficiency for self-driving car systems in crowded urban environments, but it is incremental as it adapts existing risk models for filtering.
The paper tackles the problem of filtering out unimportant agents in complex driving situations for self-driving cars to simplify behavior planning, and finds that a novel trajectory distance method balances performance, robustness, and efficiency well in large-scale experiments.
Self-driving cars face complex driving situations with a large amount of agents when moving in crowded cities. However, some of the agents are actually not influencing the behavior of the self-driving car. Filtering out unimportant agents would inherently simplify the behavior or motion planning task for the system. The planning system can then focus on fewer agents to find optimal behavior solutions for the ego~agent. This is helpful especially in terms of computational efficiency. In this paper, therefore, the research topic of importance filtering with driving risk models is introduced. We give an overview of state-of-the-art risk models and present newly adapted risk models for filtering. Their capability to filter out surrounding unimportant agents is compared in a large-scale experiment. As it turns out, the novel trajectory distance balances performance, robustness and efficiency well. Based on the results, we can further derive a novel filter architecture with multiple filter steps, for which risk models are recommended for each step, to further improve the robustness. We are confident that this will enable current behavior planning systems to better solve complex situations in everyday driving.