A new occupancy grid of the dynamic environment for autonomous vehicles

As an effective environment representation method, the obstacle occupancy grid has been widely applied on the autonomous vehicle, providing evidence for the behavior decision and path planning of autonomous vehicle. In this paper, a new obstacle occupancy grid named space-time occupancy grid map is presented. This map pays more attention on the dynamic obstacles in a period of future time, and maps the obstacle occupancy information in space-time dimension to two-dimensional grid. In this way, the useful obstacle occupancy information for the autonomous vehicle in a period of future time is provided, which enables the behavior decision and path planning to be more intelligent. The space-time occupancy grid map described in this paper has been applied on the two generations of autonomous vehicles, “Intelligent Pioneer I” and “Intelligent Pioneer II”, which have already completed 10,000 kilometers actual road tests in western suburb of Hefei, and won the first prize in the “Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge of China” Competition funded by Natural Science Foundation of China.