Formalisation and implementation of road junction rules on an autonomous vehicle modelled as an agent

Abstract

The design of autonomous vehicles includes obstacle detection and avoidance, route planning, speed control, etc. However, there is a lack of an explicitely representation of the rules of the road on an autonomous vehicle. Additionally, it is necessary to understand the behaviour of an autonomous vehicle in order to check whether or not it works according to the rules of the road. Here, we propose an agent-based architecture to embed the rules of the road into an agent representing the behaviour of an autonomous vehicle. We use temporal logic to formally represent the rules of the road in a way it should be possible to capture when and how a given rule of the road can be applied. Our contributions include: i. suggestion of changes in the rules of the road; ii. representation of rules in a suitable way for an autonomous vehicle agent; iii. dealing with indeterminate terms in the Highway Code.