Mitigating catastrophic failure at intersections of autonomous vehicles

ABSTRACT

Fully autonomous vehicles promise enormous gains in safety, efficiency, and economy. Before such gains can be realized, safety and reliability concerns must be addressed. We have previously introduced a system for managing such vehicles at intersections that is capable of handling more vehicles and causing fewer delays than traffic lights and stop signs [2]. While the system is safe under normal operating conditions, we have not discussed the possibility or implications of unforeseen mechanical failures. Because the system orchestrates such precarious "close calls" the tolerance for such errors is small.

In this paper, we introduce safety features of the system designed to deal with these types of failures, and perform a basic failure mode analysis, demonstrating that without these features, the system is unsuitable for deployment due to a propensity for catastrophic failure modes.

REFERENCES

• 1: K. Dresner and P. Stone. Multiagent traffic management: A protocol for defining intersection control policies. Technical Report UT-AI-TR-04-315, The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences, AI Laboratory, December 2004.
• 2: Kurt Dresner , Peter Stone, Multiagent traffic management: an improved intersection control mechanism, Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 25-29, 2005, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1082473.1082545]
• 3: K. Dresner and P. Stone. Sharing the road: Autonomous vehicles meet human drivers. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1263--68, Hyderabad, India, January 2007.
• 4: W. W. Wierwille, R. J. Hanowski, J. M. Hankey, C. A. Kieliszewski, S. E. Lee, A. Medina, A. S. Keisler, and T. A. Dingus. Identification and evaluation of driver errors: Overview and recommendations. Technical Report FHWA-RD-02-003, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, August 2002. Sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Keywords:
autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation systems, intersection control, multiagent systems