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This paper introduces a framework for certifying the safety clearance of trajectories selected by autonomous driving motion planners, addressing the gap between planned safety margins and actual safety performance. By employing a differentiable separating axis barrier margin to lower bound safety clearance and integrating Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) for robust evaluation, the method enhances the reliability of trajectory selection. The results show a significant reduction in conformal correction and an increase in nonnegative safety clearance certificates, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in ensuring safety in autonomous driving scenarios.
Trajectory selection in autonomous driving can now achieve over 87% safety clearance certification, dramatically improving reliability in real-world conditions.
Autonomous driving motion planners generate and select candidate trajectories while accounting for interactions with surrounding agents. However, these evaluations do not certify the actual safety clearance of the selected trajectory. The framework evaluates the trajectory selected by ant planners and calibrates the gap between its plan time margin and realized safety clearance. A differentiable separating axis barrier margin deterministically lower bounds exact signed oriented-bounding-box (OBB) safety clearance, connecting the statistical certificate to safety margin. At plan time, the margin is evaluated using either a nominal prediction and sampled lower tail Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), while post-selection conformal calibration over exchangeable drive sessions absorbs prediction and sampling errors. Conformal calibration provides statistical validity independently of predictor correctness. The method is evaluated on a frozen 300 session nuPlan study using native Predictive Driver Model (PDM) Closed loop proposals. At 10% target miscoverage, sampled lower CVaR reduces the conformal correction from 1.43m to 0.03m and increases the rate of nonnegative safety clearance certificates from 68.7% to 87.3%. Across all evaluated statistics, exact-clearance coverage remains above the 90% target at 93.3--96.7%.
