Traffic light design

Traffic Light

Role

Judgement whether a vehicle can go into an intersection or not by internal and external traffic light status, and planning a velocity of the stop if necessary. This module is designed for rule-based velocity decision that is easy for developers to design its behavior. It generates proper velocity for traffic light scene.

In addition, the STOP/GO interface of behavior_velocity_planner allows external users / modules (e.g. remote operation) to intervene the decision of the internal perception. This function is expected to be used, for example, for remote intervention in detection failure or gathering information on operator decisions during development.

Limitations

This module allows developers to design STOP/GO in traffic light module using specific rules. Due to the property of rule-based planning, the algorithm is greatly depends on object detection and perception accuracy considering traffic light. Also, this module only handles STOP/Go at traffic light scene, so rushing or quick decision according to traffic condition is future work.

Activation Timing

This module is activated when there is traffic light in ego lane.

Algorithm

1. Obtains a traffic light mapped to the route and a stop line correspond to the traffic light from a map information.

2. Uses the highest reliability one of the traffic light recognition result and if the color of that was red, generates a stop point.

3. When vehicle current velocity is

   • higher than 2.0m/s ⇒ pass judge(using next slide formula)
   • lower than 2.0m/s ⇒ stop

4. When it to be judged that vehicle can’t stop before stop line, autoware chooses one of the following behaviors

   • "can pass through" stop line during yellow lamp => pass
   • "can’t pass through" stop line during yellow lamp => emergency stop

Dilemma Zone

• yellow lamp line

  It’s called “yellow lamp line” which shows the distance traveled by the vehicle during yellow lamp.

• dilemma zone

  It’s called “dilemma zone” which satisfies following conditions:

  • vehicle can’t pass through stop line during yellow lamp.(right side of the yellow lamp line)

  • vehicle can’t stop under deceleration and jerk limit.(left side of the pass judge curve)

    ⇒emergency stop(relax deceleration and jerk limitation in order to observe the traffic regulation)

• optional zone

  It’s called “optional zone” which satisfies following conditions:

  • vehicle can pass through stop line during yellow lamp.(left side of the yellow lamp line)

  • vehicle can stop under deceleration and jerk limit.(right side of the pass judge curve)

    ⇒ stop(autoware selects the safety choice)

Module Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
stop_margin	double	[m] margin before stop point
tl_state_timeout	double	[s] time out for detected traffic light result.
external_tl_state_timeout	double	[s] time out for external traffic input
yellow_lamp_period	double	[s] time for yellow lamp
enable_pass_judge	bool	[-] whether to use pass judge

Flowchart

Known Limits

• tbd.