Highway-Driving with Safe Velocity Bounds on Occluded Traffic

Limited visibility and sensor occlusions pose press- ing safety challenges for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this work, our pursuit was to strike a balance: a method that ensures safety in occluded scenarios while preventing overly cautious behavior. We argue that such approaches are crucial for AVs’ future, par- ticularly when navigating alongside human drivers on highways at high speeds. To this end, we used reachability analysis to find safe velocity bounds on occluded traffic participants. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, we achieved velocity increases in more than 60% of the 230 cut-in scenarios from the highD dataset, without sacrificing safety.