Ensuring Safety at Intelligent Intersections: Temporal Logic Meets Reachability Analysis

In this work, we propose an approach for ensuring the safety of vehicles passing through an intelligent intersection. There are many proposals for the design of intelligent intersections that introduce central decision-makers to intersections for enhancing the efficiency and safety of the vehicles. To guarantee the safety of such designs, we develop a safety framework for intersections based on temporal logic and reachability analysis. We start by specifying the required behavior for all the vehicles that need to pass through the intersection as linear temporal logic formula. Then, using temporal logic trees, we break down the linear temporal logic specification into a series of Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analyses in an automated fashion. By successfully constructing the temporal logic tree through reachability analysis, we verify the feasibility of the intersection specification. By taking this approach, we enable a safety framework that is able to automatically provide safety guarantees on new intersection behavior specifications. To evaluate our approach, we implement the framework on a simulated T-intersection, where we show that we can check and guarantee the safety of vehicles with potentially conflicting paths.