On time-memory trade-off for collision detection

Future collision avoidance systems, which are capable of fully controlling the vehicle, have to make critical decisions in a very short time. To do this, they need to check constantly if their own vehicle's occupancy collides with the other traffic participants' occupancy. Those collision checks consume a substantial amount of time and consequently, the collision avoidance systems could fail to intervene in complex scenarios. We propose a new approach to reduce the computation time for collision checks significantly. Instead of using geometric methods, we store finitely many possible collision scenarios between two objects in a table and thus collision checks become a matter of lookup table queries. To ensure that the finite number of configurations cover all possible scenarios, we use a novel abstraction technique which guarantees that every collision will be detected. The approach works for arbitrarily many traffic participants by applying the approach pairwise (own vehicle and other object) to each traffic participant. Randomly generated scenarios show that the new approach can be several times faster than geometric intersection techniques thanks to the trade-off between memory consumption and computation time.