Gm Cruise Holdings LLC

Shad Laws

Spyros Maniatopoulos

Andrew Robinson

Martin Sehr

Rushil Goradia

Benjamin Tearle

Nitin Kapania

Autonomous vehicles may have different specialized primary planners in the vehicle planning stack that each can generate a plan for the vehicle control stack. For instance, one primary planner may be used for the vehicle to drive forward, and another primary planner may be used for the vehicle to drive in reverse. Additionally, a fallback planner may be implemented to allow the autonomous vehicle to drive in a degraded state. A unified interface is provided between the planning stack and the control stack to manage communications between the different planners in the planning stack and the control stack.

Unified interface between a control system and planners of an autonomous vehicle

A vehicle capability broadcaster may receive information indicating a condition in an environment where an AV may operate. The vehicle capability broadcaster determines a first vehicle capability parameter and a second vehicle capability parameter based on the condition. The vehicle capability parameters may indicate capabilities of the AV for making different types of motions, e.g., limits of the AV making different motions. The vehicle capability broadcaster may transmit the first vehicle capability parameter to a first planning module and transmit the second vehicle capability parameter to a second planning module. The first planning module and the second planning module may plan one or more motions of the AV in the operation based on the vehicle capability parameters. The vehicle capability broadcaster may update a vehicle capability parameter and transmit the updated vehicle capability parameter to one of the planning modules after the one or more motions are planned.

Broadcasting vehicle capabilities to planning modules

Systems and methods for failover handling at a vehicle in response to a degraded state of operation are provided. For example, a method includes receiving, from a fallback vehicle path planner of a vehicle, data indicative of a fallback path; storing, at a memory of the vehicle, the data indicative of the fallback path; receiving, from a primary vehicle path planner of the vehicle, data indicative of a primary path; receiving an event trigger indicative of a degraded operating condition associated with the primary vehicle path planner; selecting, in response to the event trigger, the fallback path over the primary path; and sending, to a control system of the vehicle in response to the selecting, the stored data indicative of the fallback path.

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Shad Laws