Context-aware perception

Abstract

In various examples, systems and methods are disclosed relating to refinement of safety zones and improving evaluation metrics for the perception modules of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. Example implementations can exclude areas in the state space that are not safety critical, while retaining the areas that are safety-critical. This can be accomplished by leveraging ego maneuver information and conditioning safety zone computations on ego maneuvers. A maneuver-based decomposition of perception safety zones may leverage a temporal convolution operation with the capability to account for collision at any intermediate time along the way to maneuver completion. This provides a significant reduction in zone volume while maintaining completeness, thus optimizing or otherwise enhancing obstacle perception performance requirements by filtering out regions of state space not relevant to a system's route of travel. Computation of safety-zones conditioned on the ego maneuver greatly reduces excessive conservatism.