Detecting safety-relevant road traffic conflicts

A system comprising:

• one or more computers and one or more storage devices storing instructions that are operable, when executed by the one or more computers, to cause the one or more computers to perform operations comprising:
• receiving, by an onboard system of an autonomously driven vehicle (ADV), data representing a traffic scenario involving an agent and another entity in a driving environment;
• computing a safety-relevant metric for a first plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the safety-relevant metric represents a level of safety risk between the agent and the other entity;
• computing a surprise metric for a second plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the surprise metric represents a deviation of the agent from a predicted state of the agent in the traffic scenario;
• determining that the surprise metric satisfies a surprise threshold within a threshold time window of the safety-relevant metric satisfying a safety-relevant threshold;
• in response, designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict;
• and
• causing the ADV to perform a driving maneuver in response to designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict.

A computer storage medium encoded with a computer program, the program comprising instructions that are operable, when executed by data processing apparatus, to cause the data processing apparatus to perform operations comprising:

• receiving, by an onboard system of an autonomously driven vehicle (ADV), data representing a traffic scenario involving an agent and another entity in a driving environment;
• computing a safety-relevant metric for a first plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the safety-relevant metric represents a level of safety risk between the agent and the other entity;
• computing a surprise metric for a second plurality of time points of the traffic scenario, wherein the surprise metric represents a deviation of the agent from a predicted state of the agent in the traffic scenario;
• determining that the surprise metric satisfies a surprise threshold within a threshold time window of the safety-relevant metric satisfying a safety-relevant threshold;
• in response, designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict;
• and
• causing the ADV to perform a driving maneuver in response to designating the traffic scenario as a safety-relevant traffic conflict.