Autonomous Vehicle Interactions with Other Road Users: Conflicts and Resolutions

As autonomous vehicles, or AVs, enter the market, other road users will need to interact with them in an effective manner. Currently, in manuallydriven cars, the effectiveness of this interaction is based on the rules of the road that define priorities as well as ad-hoc negotiations to resolve conflicts. To formalize the conflict issue, we introduce the concept of legal zones showing how the road space can be described as graph of these zones. We also introduce the concept of operational regions around a vehicle which must not be infringed upon by others (to avoid safety conflicts). Using these two concepts we show how it is possible to consider new rules for the management of conflict in AV operations. We first briefly describe a new protocol for lane changes and then focus our attention on a protocol for managing conflicts in a pedestrian crossing situation.