Co-Pilot Agent for Vehicle/Driver Cooperative and Autonomous Driving

ETRI's Co-Pilot project is aimed at the development of an automated vehicle that cooperates with a driver and interacts with other vehicles on the road while obeying traffic rules without collisions. This paper presents a core block within the Co-Pilot system; the block is named "Co-Pilot agent" and consists of several main modules, such as road map generation, decision-making, and trajectory generation. The road map generation builds road map data to provide enhanced and detailed map data. The decision-making, designed to serve situation assessment and behavior planning, evaluates a collision risk of traffic situations and determines maneuvers to follow a global path as well as to avoid collisions. The trajectory generation generates a trajectory to achieve the given maneuver by the decision-making module. The system is implemented in an open-source robot operating system to provide a reusable, hardware-independent software platform; it is then tested on a closed road with other vehicles in several scenarios similar to real road environments to verify that it works properly for cooperative driving with a driver and automated driving.