Collision Risk Assessment for Intelligent Vehicles Considering Multi-Dimensional Uncertainties

To ensure the reliability of autonomous driving, the system must be capable of potential hazard identification and appropriate response to prevent accidents. This involves the prediction of possible developments in traffic situations and an evaluation of the potential danger of future scenarios. Precise Collision Risk Assessment (CRA) faces complex challenges due to uncertainties inherent in vehicle and road environmental conditions. This paper introduces a new CRA approach, the Multi-Dimensional Uncertainties-CRA (MDU-CRA), which integrates uncertainties related to driver behavior, sensor perception, motion prediction models, and road infrastructure into a comprehensive risk evaluation framework. The estimation of vehicle state is initiated using Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF) to capture uncertainties in sensor perception. Concurrently, a probabilistic motion prediction model based on Gaussian distributions has been developed, which considers the uncertainty in driver behavior. Subsequently, the uncertainty of the road structure is modeled using a truncated Gaussian distribution. Finally, collision risk is quantified as the future probability of collision through heuristic Monte Carlo (MC) sampling. This paper presents the results of two experiments Firstly, our proposed method is demonstrated to outperform the reference neural network-based method in terms of short-term motion prediction accuracy. Secondly, two driving scenarios are extracted and reconstructed from the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) dataset for validation and evaluation, i.e., an active lane-change scenario and an emergency braking scenario. In the domain of collision risk assessment, our approach consistently outperforms other evaluation methods. It exhibits the capability to perceive collision risks 2 to 5 seconds in advance, significantly reducing the probability of imminent collision incidents.