Trajectory data analysis is an essential component for highly automated driving. Complex models developed with these data predict other road users' movement and behavior patterns. Based on these predictions -and additional contextual information such as the course of the road, (traffic) rules, and interaction with other road users -the highly automated vehicle (HAV) must be able to reliably and safely perform the task assigned to it, e.g., moving from point A to B. Ideally, the HAV moves safely through its environment, just as we would expect a human driver to do. However, if unusual trajectories occur, so-called trajectory corner cases, a human driver can usually cope well, but an HAV can quickly get into trouble. In the definition of trajectory corner cases, which we provide in this work, we will consider the relevance of unusual trajectories with respect to the task at hand. Based on this, we will also present a taxonomy of different trajectory corner cases. The categorization of corner cases into the taxonomy will be shown with examples and is done by cause and required data sources. To illustrate the complexity between the machine learning (ML) model and the corner case cause, we present a general processing chain underlying the taxonomy.

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In this work, we present an uncertainty-based method for sensor fusion with camera and radar data. The outputs of two neural networks, one processing camera and the other one radar data, are combined in an uncertainty aware manner. To this end, we gather the outputs and corresponding meta information for both networks. For each predicted object, the gathered information is post-processed by a gradient boosting method to produce a joint prediction of both networks. In our experiments we combine the YOLOv3 object detection network with a customized 1D radar segmentation network and evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset. In particular we focus on night scenes, where the capability of object detection networks based on camera data is potentially handicapped. Our experiments show, that this approach of uncertainty aware fusion, which is also of very modular nature, significantly gains performance compared to single sensor baselines and is in range of specifically tailored deep learning based fusion approaches.

The overall goal of this work is to enrich training data for automated driving with so called corner cases. In road traffic, corner cases are critical, rare and unusual situations that challenge the perception by AI algorithms. For this purpose, we present the design of a test rig to generate synthetic corner cases using a human-in-the-loop approach. For the test rig, a realtime semantic segmentation network is trained and integrated into the driving simulation software CARLA in such a way that a human can drive on the network's prediction. In addition, a second person gets to see the same scene from the original CARLA output and is supposed to intervene with the help of a second control unit as soon as the semantic driver shows dangerous driving behavior. Interventions potentially indicate poor recognition of a critical scene by the segmentation network and then represents a corner case. In our experiments, we show that targeted enrichment of training data with corner cases leads to improvements in pedestrian detection in safety relevant episodes in road traffic.

In this study, we propose a novel approach to enrich the training data for automated driving by using a self-designed driving simulator and two human drivers to generate safety-critical corner cases in a short period of time, as already presented in [12]. Our results show that incorporating these corner cases during training improves the recognition of corner cases during testing, even though, they were recorded due to visual impairment. Using the corner case triggering pipeline developed in the previous work, we investigate the effectiveness of using expert models to overcome the domain gap due to different weather conditions and times of day, compared to a universal model from a development perspective. Our study reveals that expert models can provide significant benefits in terms of performance and efficiency, and can reduce the time and effort required for model training. Our results contribute to the progress of automated driving, providing a pathway for safer and more reliable autonomous vehicles on the road in the future.