LiDAR-Based Fail-Safe Emergency Maneuver for Autonomous Vehicles 2023-01-0578
Although SAE level 5 autonomous vehicles are not yet commercially available, they will need to be the most intelligent, secure, and safe autonomous vehicles with the highest level of automation. The vehicle will be able to drive itself in all lighting and weather conditions, at all times of the day, on all types of roads and in any traffic scenario. The human intervention in level 5 vehicles will be limited to passenger voice commands, which means level 5 autonomous vehicles need to be safe and capable of recovering fail operational with no intervention from the driver to guarantee the maximum safety for the passengers. In this paper a LiDAR-based fail-safe emergency maneuver system is proposed to be implemented in the level 5 autonomous vehicle. This system is composed of an external redundant 3600 spinning LiDAR sensor and a redundant ECU that is running a single task to steer and fully stop the vehicle in emergency situations (e.g., vehicle crash, system failure, sensor failures, vehicle pile-up, etc.) by creating a map and occupancy grid of the LiDAR PointClouds, plan a path and follow the path to full stop in a short time and safe manner.
