The Future of Autonomy and Safety in Mixed Traffic Urban Environments

We are at the mid-point of an NSF CPS Program supported project on Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments. The objective of this research is to “scale up” the capabilities of fully autonomous vehicles so they are capable of operating in mixed-traffic urban environments: realistic large-city driving situations with many other (mostly human-driven) vehicles. The approach is to integrate interdisciplinary advances in software, sensing and control, and modeling to address the most serious weaknesses in autonomous vehicle design revealed recently by, e.g., the DARPA Urban Challenge. Our ongoing project is therefore intimately related to the topic of this Workshop and my Position Paper will mention both some ongoing research addressing the relevant topics and present some issues substantially beyond what we can address during the tenure of our project.