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 13:
14. A method, comprising:
in response to acquiring sensor data from a sensor of an ego vehicle about a surrounding environment including a roadway, identifying roadway elements from the sensor data, the roadway elements including 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;
grouping the roadway elements into groups according to characteristics of the lane markers and the trajectories of the one or more surrounding vehicles indicating parallelism using a clustering algorithm;
analyzing the groups according to a confidence heuristic by calculating priority metrics for each of the groups including assigning weights to the roadway elements to determine a priority group from the groups that corresponds with a trajectory of the ego vehicle; and
providing the priority group to cause the ego vehicle to plan a 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.