Florian Lercher from TUM will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “No More Traffic Tickets: Ensuring Traffic-Rule Compliance of Automated Vehicles” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 10th July 2025.

Abstract

Imagine an automated vehicle violating a traffic rule and, by that, causing an accident. This would not only be devastating for a responsible operator, but, more importantly, each such incident erodes the trust of the public in automated vehicles. Fortunately, compliance with traffic rules can be fully controlled unless other traffic participants breach them — this causality makes it possible for responsible operators to avoid liability claims. Despite their importance, traffic rules are often only implicitly embedded in various fragments of the software stack of automated vehicles. However, traffic rule compliance should be ensured by formal methods to gain the necessary trust of the public. To this end, traffic rules should be represented explicitly and provided centrally.

Using a running example, this talk provides an overview of the steps required to achieve this goal. We start by formalizing traffic law to obtain an explicit representation in temporal logic. Based on this, we design a motion planning pipeline comprising three steps: reachability analysis to narrow the search space for rule-compliant trajectories, trajectory planning within the narrowed search space, and trajectory repairing to ensure rule-compliance of planned trajectories. Moreover, we always keep a fail-safe trajectory ready to safely react to unexpected behavior of other traffic participants.

Biograpyh

Florian Lercher is a graduate of the elite program Software Engineering and works on his Ph.D. at the Cyber Physical Systems Group at TUM.