Waymo patents method for self-driving cars to flag risky traffic moments
This patent describes a system for autonomous vehicles that identifies dangerous traffic situations by combining two measurements. It calculates a safety risk level and a "surprise" factor, which measures how much a nearby driver or pedestrian deviates from expected behavior. If both metrics exceed set limits within a specific time window, the car flags the event as a safety conflict and adjusts its driving.
In the filing’s own words
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for automatically designating traffic scenarios as safety-relevant traffic conflicts between agents in a driving environment. One of the methods includes receiving data representing a traffic scenario involving two agents; computing a safety-relevant metric for a first plurality of time points of the traffic scenario; computing a surprise metric for a second plurality of time points of the traffic scenario; determining that the surprise metric satisfies a surprise threshold within a threshold time window of the safety-relevant metric satisfying a safety-relevant threshold; and in response, designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict.
What exactly they claim (claim 1)
1. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, by an onboard system of an autonomously driven vehicle (ADV), data representing a traffic scenario involving an agent and another entity in a driving environment; computing a safety-relevant metric for a first plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the safety-relevant metric represents a level of safety risk between the agent and the other entity; computing a surprise metric for a second plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the surprise metric represents a deviation of the agent from a predicted state of the agent in the traffic scenario; determining that the surprise metric satisfies a surprise threshold within a threshold time window of the safety-relevant metric satisfying a safety-relevant threshold; in response, designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict; and causing the ADV to perform a driving maneuver in response to designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict.
Facts
- Company
- Google (Waymo LLC)
- Official title
- Detecting safety-relevant road traffic conflicts
- Patent number
- US12749393B2
- Application number
- 18642336
- Filed
- Apr 22, 2024
- Granted
- Sep 29, 2026
- Inventors
- 6
- Claims
- 20
Classified under
G08G 1/0133 Physics & computingG08G 1/0112 Physics & computingG08G 1/166 Physics & computingMore from Google in Cars & transport
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Summaries are simplified from the filing’s own abstract and first claim. A patent filing is not a product announcement.
Patent data and drawings: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Nebula is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USPTO.