Rules of the Road: Safety and Liveness Guarantees for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel game-based framework for autonomous vehicles that guarantees safety in all traffic conditions and progress in sparse traffic, validated through proofs and simulations.

Contribution

It presents a new quasi-simultaneous game paradigm and an agent protocol ensuring safety and liveness guarantees for autonomous vehicles.

Findings

Protocol guarantees safety under all traffic conditions.

Protocol ensures liveness in sparse traffic.

Validated results through proofs and simulations.

Abstract

The ability to guarantee safety and progress for all vehicles is vital to the success of the autonomous vehicle industry. We present a framework for designing autonomous vehicle behavior in a way that is safe and guarantees progress for all agents. In this paper, we first introduce a new game paradigm which we term the quasi-simultaneous game. We then define an agent protocol that all agents must use to make decisions in this quasi-simultaneous game setting. According to the protocol, agents first select an intended action using a behavioral profile. Then, the protocol defines whether an agent has precedence to take its intended action or must take a sub-optimal action. The protocol ensures safety under all traffic conditions and liveness for all agents under `sparse' traffic conditions. We provide proofs of correctness of the protocol and validate our results in simulation.