Automated Generation of Dynamic Occlusion-Caused Collisions

Abstract

Dynamic occlusions (occlusions caused by other moving road objects) pose some of the most difficult challenges for autonomous driving systems (ADS). Validating the robustness of ADSs to safety critical dynamic occlusions is a difficult task due to the rarity of such scenarios in recorded driving logs. We provide a novel typology of dynamic occlusion scenarios involving vehicles, as well as a framework for ADS safety validation in the presence of dynamic occlusions. Our framework allows for the generation of a diverse set of dynamic occlusion-caused collisions (OCCs) across a wide variety of intersections. We provide results demonstrating that our technique achieves higher generation efficiency and diversity of OCCs than prior works, while being applicable to a wide range of intersections. In this work, we present our generation technique and provide a detailed analysis of the variety and quality of our generated scenarios, as measured by typology coverage, scenario severity, and robustness to faster reaction times.