Safe-Enhanced Autonomous Driving Technology Using Conformal Prediction Results

Abstract Autonomous driving technology significantly improves road safety, mitigates traffic congestion, and paves the way for a more efficient and connected transportation future. However, the uncertain driving scenarios poses a great challenge to the safe control of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Therefore, this paper proposes an enhanced safety control framework by integrating the quantified prediction results of human driving behaviors into the path-planning process. First, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is employed for driver behavior prediction, based on which, the conformal prediction, a mathematical statistical method, is introduced to quantify the uncertainties of the prediction results with a probabilistic presentation. Then, a model predictive model controller (MPC) is designed to enable the path-planning ability. By using the Lipschitz constant, the inequality for obstacle avoidance is reformulated as a hard constraint in the MPC optimization framework while considering the conformal prediction results. Finally, some simulation test cases are conducted to validate the proposed method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness to guarantee the safety of AVs with uncertain prediction results.