Software architecture proposal for navigation and decisions of autonomous ground vehicles in controlled environments with unavoidable collision scenarios

Abstract

In recent years the ethic of autonomous vehicles has become one of the main topics of discussion in the field of autonomous driving. On this thesis the problem of the ethics of autonomous vehicles will not be resolved, at least not in its totality, but an approach to the problem and to a possible solution will be presented. In order to address this problem a software architecture is proposed, such architecture will be in charge of the navigation of the vehicle and obstacle avoidance, furthermore, it will provide the necessary information to take decisions in case of unavoidable collisions. Using a fuzzy logic implementation, the objective is to generate a set of outputs that, in theory, should allow a secondary system to take a decision in a case of unavoidable collision. Nevertheless, such secondary system is not present in this paper. The results obtained were validated using statistical data. As a whole, the system shows a competent ability to determine the situation and generate the outputs.