Patent ID: 11932245
Assignee: TOYOTA MOTOR ENGINEERING & MANUFACTURING NORTH AMERICA, INC.
Field: Transport (Mechanical engineering)
Classification: CPC B  G  H | IPC B  G  H

Claim 8:
9. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions for improving identification of a path for an ego vehicle on a roadway and that when executed by one or more processors cause the one or more processors to:
in response to acquiring sensor data from at least one sensor of the ego vehicle about a surrounding environment, identify roadway elements from the sensor data as cues about the path, wherein the roadway elements include lane markers of the roadway and trajectories of one or more surrounding vehicles with combinations of individual lane markers as single roadway elements with the lane markers across multiple separate lanes defining a single element;
group the roadway elements into two or more groups that are separately parallel according to characteristics of the lane markers and the trajectories of the one or more surrounding vehicles indicating parallelism using a clustering algorithm,
analyze the two or more groups according to a confidence heuristic by calculating priority metrics for each of the groups including assigning weights to the roadway elements, including weights for sets of lane lines of multiple lanes, to determine a priority group from the two or more groups that corresponds with a trajectory of the ego vehicle as an indicator of being parallel with a path of the ego vehicle; and
provide the priority group to cause the ego vehicle to plan the path using the roadway elements of the priority group as an indicator about environmental cues that are parallel to a direction of the path and controlling the ego vehicle to follow the path.