A Safe Interaction Framework for Road Vehicle Control Towers

Automated vehicles have to interact to make urban traffic safe. To handle many unplanned traffic issues, such as occlusions and system failures, automated vehicles need to cooperate with each other and the connected road infrastructure. A key component in a connected road infrastructure is the road vehicle control tower, where human operators can supervise and manage fleets of automated vehicles to ensure their safe and efficient operation. By introducing such operators, the transport system is able to mitigate a variety of complex scenarios, but at the expense of potentially introducing new human errors. In this chapter, we provide an overview of road vehicle control towers and how to guarantee safe interaction between automated driving systems and human operators. Specifically, we present our work on a behavior tree-based interaction framework that allows operators to intuitively create specifications for vehicle behavior. Using the human-defined behavior specification tree, we compute temporal logic trees, which allow us to both formally verify the feasibility of the specifications and to synthesize control sets that guarantee the specifications’ completion. Finally, we overview the implementation of a shared-autonomy approach to remote driving under the interaction framework to illustrate how it can be used for guaranteeing safety in practical use-cases.