Safe Corridor: A Trajectory-Based Safety Concept for Teleoperated Road Vehicles

Automated vehicles and their operational range are getting better over time. Due to the complexity of urban traffic, it might not be feasible for an automated vehicle to handle all occasions. To maintain vehicle operation, a remote operator can connect to the vehicle via the cellular network to resolve those situations. This method, called Teleoperated Driving (ToD), introduces new safety challenges to the vehicle. Due to fluctuations in network performance and missing physical connection to the vehicle, there is no guarantee that the operator is continuously able to safely control the vehicle. Therefore, a concept is proposed that enables the vehicle to return to a safe state if certain system requirements are not met. This concept relies on a safe trajectory, which is implicitly planned by the operator as long as all system requirements are met.