Navigating Roundabouts and Unprotected Turns in Autonomous Driving

The development of a fully autonomous driving vehicle (AV) requires various traffic situations to be handled efficiently. One of the most common driving maneuvers that an AV experiences in daily traffic is giving way (yielding) to other traffic participants. In this article, we propose a simple yet efficient method of yielding that does not query yielding areas of interest from map application programming interface (API) making it hassle free to use without having to rely on digitized yielding areas. We incorporated our method into one of the well-known open-source autonomy stacks called Autoware. The proposed method makes use of high-definition (HD) map elements, including lanes and stop lines for filtering vehicles that participate in yielding decision-making. Our method estimates future collisions of filtered vehicles of interest (VOIs) with AV’s planned trajectory and outputs a binary yielding decision for ego vehicle. Our method covers different yielding areas, including a roundabout and an unprotected turn. We tested and evaluated the decision-making of our method on various simulated scenarios, and afterward, successful real-world tests were conducted using an in-house AV. An in-depth analysis of our approach shows that the proposed yielding solution works reasonably well, i.e., 87% successful yielding area navigation ratio on real data.