Looking for Trouble: Informative Planning for Safe Trajectories with Occlusions

Planning a safe trajectory for an ego vehicle through an environment with occluded regions is a challenging task. Existing methods use some combination of metrics to evaluate a trajectory, either taking a worst case view or allowing for some probabilistic estimate, to eliminate or minimize the risk of collision respectively. Typically, these approaches assume occluded regions of the environment are unsafe and must be avoided, resulting in overly conservative trajectories-particularly when there are no hidden risks present. We propose a local trajectory planning algorithm which generates safe trajectories that maximize observations on un-certain regions. In particular, we seek to gain information on occluded areas that are most likely to pose a risk to the ego vehicle on its future path. Calculating the information gain is a computationally complex problem; our method approximates the maximum information gain and results in vehicle motion that remains safe but is less conservative than state-of-the-art approaches. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method within the CARLA simulator in different scenarios.