Automated vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly evaluated before their release and deployment. A widely used evaluation approach is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT), which tests prototype vehicles directly on the public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs are time consuming and expensive to conduct. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. The results can be used to generate motions of the other primary vehicles to accelerate the verification of AVs in simulations and controlled experiments. Frontal collision due to unsafe cut-ins is the target crash type of this paper. Human-controlled vehicles making unsafe lane changes are modeled as the primary disturbance to AVs based on data collected by the University of Michigan Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behaviors, which generate risky testing scenarios while preserving the statistical information so that the safety benefits of AVs in nonaccelerated cases can be accurately estimated. The cross-entropy method is used to recursively search for the optimal skewing parameters. The frequencies of the occurrences of conflicts, crashes, and injuries are estimated for a modeled AV, and the achieved accelerated rate is around 2000 to 20 000. In other words, in the accelerated simulations, driving for 1000 miles will expose the AV with challenging scenarios that will take about 2 to 20 million miles of real-world driving to encounter. This technique thus has the potential to greatly reduce the development and validation time for AVs.
It is important to rigorously and comprehensively evaluate the safety of Automated Vehicles (AVs) before their production and deployment. A popular AV evaluation approach is Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT) which tests prototype vehicles directly on public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs is time-consuming and expensive to conduct. Computer simulations can be used as an alternative to N-FOTs, especially in terms of generating motions of the surrounding traffic. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. Human-controlled vehicles (HVs) were modeled as disturbance to AVs based on data extracted from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behavior, which amplifies riskier testing scenarios while reserves its statistical information so that the safety benefits of AV in non-accelerated cases can be accurately estimated. An AV model based on a production vehicle was tested. Results show that the proposed method can accelerate the evaluation process by at least 100 times.
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