Towards Safe Vehicle Navigation in Dynamic Urban Scenarios

This paper describes the deliberative part of a navigation architecture designed for safe vehicle navigation in dynamic urban environments. It comprises two key modules working together in a hierarchical fashion: (a) the Route Planner whose purpose is to compute a valid itinerary towards the a given goal. An itinerary comprises a geometric path augmented with additional information based on the structure of the environment considered and traffic regulations, and (b) the Partial Motion Planner whose purpose is to ensure the proper following of the itinerary while dealing with the moving objects present in the environment (eg other vehicles, pedestrians). In the architecture proposed, a special attention is paid to the motion safety issue, ie the ability to avoid collisions. Different safety levels are explored and their operational conditions are explicitly spelled out (something which is usually not done).