General Obstacle Avoidance Capability Assessment for Autonomous Vehicles

As autonomous vehicle (AV) capabilities expand, it is important to ensure their safety during testing and deployment for public usage. While several testing regulations have been proposed in research, US federal, and even global guidelines for low-speed vehicles in metropolitan settings, regulations for high-speed travel are mainly vacant—this is especially true for regulations relating to AV emergency obstacle avoidance maneuvers (EOAMs). Research in this manuscript introduces a general obstacle avoidance capability assessment (GOACA) for AVs traveling at highway speeds. This GOACA includes test modes including car and bicycle active road objects (AROs) in rural and urban highway settings. These tests were novel in their definitions, methodologies, and execution, especially in the context of AVs driving at highway speeds—critically, this research proposes a test evaluation protocol such that it could serve as a foundation for an official regulation in the future. These GOACA tests included adjacent traffic vehicles which have not been utilized in the prior literature when considering EOAMs within a wholistic AV system context. While the vehicle type will cause simulation results to var, in general, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is recommended for usage with AVs at highway speeds for critical safety. This is especially true when considering oncoming traffic and low surface μ conditions.