Title: Autonomous Vehicle Speed Control for Safe Navigation of Occluded Pedestrian Crosswalk,
Abstract: Both humans and the sensors on an autonomous vehicle have limited sensing
capabilities. When these limitations coincide with scenarios involving
vulnerable road users, it becomes important to account for these limitations in
the motion planner. For the scenario of an occluded pedestrian crosswalk, the
speed of the approaching vehicle should be a function of the amount of
uncertainty on the roadway. In this work, the longitudinal controller is
formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process and dynamic
programming is used to compute the control policy. The control policy scales
the speed profile to be used by a model predictive steering controller.