Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:Ensuring safe driving while maintaining travel efficiency for autonomous vehicles in dynamic and occluded environments is a critical challenge. This paper proposes an occlusion-aware contingency safety-critical planning approach for real-time autonomous driving. Leveraging reachability analysis for risk assessment, forward reachable sets of phantom vehicles are used to derive risk-aware dynamic velocity boundaries. These velocity boundaries are incorporated into a biconvex nonlinear programming (NLP) formulation that formally enforces safety using spatiotemporal barrier constraints, while simultaneously optimizing exploration and fallback trajectories within a receding horizon planning framework. To enable real-time computation and coordination between trajectories, we employ the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the biconvex NLP problem into low-dimensional convex subproblems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulations and real-world experiments in occluded intersections. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced safety and improved travel efficiency, enabling real-time safe trajectory generation in dynamic occluded intersections under varying obstacle conditions. The project page is available at this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2502.06359 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2502.06359v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.06359 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, vol. 56, no. 5, pp. 2777-2790, May 2026

https://doi.org/10.1109/TCYB.2025.3632366 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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