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arXiv · 2502.06359

Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving

Lei Zheng·Rui Yang·Minzhe Zheng·Zengqi Peng·Michael Yu Wang·Jun Ma
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Abstract

Ensuring safe driving while maintaining travel efficiency for autonomous vehicles in dynamic and occluded environments is a critical challenge. This paper proposes an occlusion-aware contingency safety-critical planning approach for real-time autonomous driving. Leveraging reachability analysis for risk assessment, forward reachable sets of phantom vehicles are used to derive risk-aware dynamic velocity boundaries. These velocity boundaries are incorporated into a biconvex nonlinear programming (NLP) formulation that formally enforces safety using spatiotemporal barrier constraints, while simultaneously optimizing exploration and fallback trajectories within a receding horizon planning framework. To enable real-time computation and coordination between trajectories, we employ the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the biconvex NLP problem into low-dimensional convex subproblems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulations and real-world experiments in occluded intersections. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced safety and improved travel efficiency, enabling real-time safe trajectory generation in dynamic occluded intersections under varying obstacle conditions. The project page is available at https://zack4417.github.io/oacp-website/.

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Lei Zheng, Rui Yang, Minzhe Zheng, Zengqi Peng, Michael Yu Wang, Jun Ma. 2025-11-22. Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving. https://doi.org/10.1109/tcyb.2025.3632366

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