We present an approach to assess the risk taken by on-road vehicles within the framework of artificial field theory, envisioned for safety analysis and design of driving support/automation applications. Here, any obstacle (neighboring entity on the road) to the subject vehicle is treated as a finite scalar risk field that is formulated in the predicted configuration space of the subject vehicle. The driving risk estimate is the strength of the risk field at the subject vehicle’s future location. This risk field is formulated as the product of two factors: collision probability and expected crash energy. The collision probability with neighboring vehicles is estimated based on probabilistic motion predictions. The risk can be assessed for a single time step or over multiple future time steps, depending on the required temporal resolution of the estimates. We verified the single step approach in three near-crash situations from a naturalistic dataset and in cut-in and hard-braking scenarios with simulation and showed the application of the multi-step approach in selecting the safest path in a lane-drop section. The risk descriptions from the proposed approach qualitatively reflect the narration of the situation and are in general consistent with Time To Collision. Compared to current surrogate measures of safety, the proposed risk estimate provides a better basis to assess the driving safety of an individual vehicle by considering the uncertainty over the future ambient traffic state and magnitude of expected crash consequences. The proposed driving risk model can be used as a component of intelligent vehicle safety applications and as a comprehensive surrogate measure for assessing traffic safety.

我们提出了一种在人工场理论的框架内评估道路车辆风险的方法，该方法旨在进行安全性分析和驾驶支持/自动化应用程序的设计。在此，对目标车辆的任何障碍物（道路上的邻居）都被视为在目标车辆的预测配置空间中制定的有限标量风险字段。驾驶风险估计是目标车辆未来位置的风险场的强度。此风险字段公式化为两个因素的乘积：碰撞概率和预期碰撞能量。基于概率运动预测来估计与相邻车辆的碰撞概率。可以针对单个时间步长评估风险，也可以针对多个未来时间步长评估风险，取决于所需的估计时间分辨率。我们从自然数据集中验证了三种接近碰撞情况下的单步方法，并通过仿真验证了切入和硬制动情况，并展示了多步方法在车道下降区选择最安全路径中的应用。拟议方法中的风险描述从质上反映了情况的叙述，并且总体上与碰撞时间一致。与当前的替代安全措施相比，通过考虑未来环境交通状况的不确定性和预期碰撞后果的严重程度，建议的风险估算为评估单个车辆的行驶安全性提供了更好的基础。