Enhancing autonomous vehicle hyperawareness in busy traffic environments: A machine learning approach

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) advance from theory into practice, their safety and operational impacts are being more closely studied. This study aims to contribute to the ever-evolving algorithms used by AVs during travel in busy urban districts, as well as explore the potential utilization of AV sensor data to identify safety hazards to surrounding road users in real time. Accordingly, the study incorporates AV data collected from multiple cities in the United States to detect and categorize traffic conflicts that involve the source AVs, as well as conflicts that involve other surrounding road users. Then, a machine learning conflict prediction model is trained with Isolation Forest - Convolutional Neural Network - Long Short-Term Memory (IF-CNN-LSTM) layers. The model receives data in real time in the form of road user trajectories and headings to make an informed prediction of the potential frequency and severity of conflicts three seconds into the future. In addition, the transferability of the trained model to new data and locations is explored to understand the potential compromise in accuracy compared to the effort and cost of retraining. The results show that the proposed model is capable of predicting the possibility of conflict occurrence and conflict severity with high accuracy (sensitivity = 83.5 % and fallout = 11 %). The reported sensitivity of AV conflict prediction ranged between 89 % and 95 %, depending on conflict type, which outperforms most of the existing conflict prediction models. The model is also capable of predicting hazardous conflicts of surrounding road users in real time, with sensitivity values ranging between 82 % and 87 %, affirming the promising capabilities of onboard vehicle sensors in undertaking real-time safety applications. The model also retains good performance when transferred to different data, with the potential to retain nearly 97 % of the source model's performance if sufficient tuning data exists.