Ford Global Technolgoies, LLC

Daniel Althoff

Scott Julian Varnhagen

Christian Appelt

David Lenz

Damir Mirkovic

Georgios Fagogenis

Andreas Joachim Knoblach

An autonomous vehicle navigates an environment in which occlusions block the vehicle's ability to detect moving objects. The vehicle handles this by receiving sensor data corresponding to the environment, identifying one or more particles of a plurality of initialized particles that have a non-zero probability of being associated with a potential occluded actor in the occluded region, and generating a trajectory of the autonomous vehicle for traversing the environment based on spatiotemporal reasoning about the occluded region and taking into account the one or more particles. Each particle may be associated with a potential actor.

Methods and systems for handling occlusions in operation of autonomous vehicle

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer program products for vehicle path planning. The methods comprise: estimating a current state of a vehicle based on sensor data; generating a control error representing a difference between the estimated current state of the vehicle and a desired state of the vehicle as described by a previously published trajectory; comparing the control error to a threshold value; generating a first plan for the vehicle using an open-loop path planning approach when the control error is below the threshold value or a second plan for the vehicle using a closed-loop path planning approach when the control error is above the threshold value; and causing the vehicle to execute the first or second plan.

Systems and methods for hybrid open-loop and closed-loop path planning

Growing community of inventors

Bavaria, Germany

Daniel Althoff