RSS Model Calibration and Evaluation for AV Driving Safety based on Naturalistic Driving Data

The definition and evaluation of driving safety for automated vehicles (AVs) is a key element to enable safe and scalable AV applications. Although different distance-based and/or time-based safety metrics have been proposed, a unified standard has not yet been recognized as a baseline to assess the safety of AV behavior. Moreover, the relationship between existing AV safety metrics (models) and naturalistic driving data, which indicate driving safety and comfort defined by human drivers, is not well explored. Utilizing the responsibility-sensitive safety (RSS) model, a new methodology is proposed to calibrate the RSS model based on naturalistic driving data. Without significantly relying on (large) safety-critical or collision data, the proposed method defines an optimization framework to calibrate the RSS model parameters and describes AV driving safety through both safe and safety-critical data in a cross-checking manner. Evaluation of the calibrated RSS model is discussed based on naturalistic driving data in Los Angeles, USA.