MoCCA: A Movable Circle Probability of Collision Approximation

Chance-constrained Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is increasingly adopted for navigation in dynamic environments to explicitly bound collision risk. However, these probabilistic guarantees implicitly assume that upstream uncertainties from localization and perception are well-calibrated. In practice, estimators are often miscalibrated, inducing characteristic closed-loop failure modes: overconfidence leads to systematic safety violations, while underconfidence triggers overly conservative freezing or probability dilution. To address this critical gap, our primary contribution is a rigorous evaluation methodology applying proper scoring rules to assess the statistical validity of predicted collision risks during closed-loop execution. Concurrently, Dual-Uncertainty Chance-Constrained Tube MPPI (DUCCT-MPPI) is proposed as a real-time, risk-aware planning architecture. DUCCT-MPPI jointly integrates localization uncertainty via a one-tube Unscented Transform (UT) approximation and dynamic obstacle prediction uncertainty via Monte Carlo aggregation. Through extensive physics-based simulations, the framework demonstrates robust failure-mitigation, seamlessly transitioning to safe, conservative maneuvering without succumbing to functional deadlocks in highly cluttered environments. In highly cluttered environments, DUCCT-MPPI achieves superior robustness, outperforming established Monte Carlo MPPI baselines by nearly 28% in navigation success rate, while simultaneously recording the lowest travel times and minimizing induced social forces. Ultimately, these findings establish that reliable probabilistic safety in autonomous navigation dictates not only expressive risk models but statistically valid uncertainty estimates throughout the entire autonomy stack.

Autonomous driving requires reliable collision avoidance in dynamic environments. Nonlinear Model Predictive Controllers (NMPCs) are suitable for this task, but struggle in time-critical scenarios requiring high frequency. To meet this demand, optimization problems are often simplified via linearization, narrowing the horizon window, or reduced temporal nodes, each compromising accuracy or reliability. This work presents the first general convex obstacle avoidance formulation, enabled by a novel approach to integrating logic. This facilitates the incorporation of an obstacle avoidance formulation into convex MPC schemes, enabling a convex optimization framework with substantially improved computational efficiency relative to conventional nonconvex methods. A key property of the formulation is that obstacle avoidance remains effective even when obstacles lie outside the prediction horizon, allowing shorter horizons for real-time deployment. In scenarios where nonconvex formulations are unavoidable, the proposed method meets or exceeds the performance of representative nonconvex alternatives. The method is evaluated in autonomous vehicle applications, where system dynamics are highly nonlinear.

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding traffic agents is critical for safe autonomous navigation and collision avoidance. Despite all advances in the trajectory forecasting realm, the prediction models remains vulnerable to uncertainty caused by occlusions, limited sensing range, and perception errors. Collaborative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) approaches help reduce this uncertainty by sharing complementary information. Existing collaborative trajectory prediction methods typically fuse feature maps at the perception stage to construct a holistic scene view. Further this holistic representation is decoded into the future trajectories. Such design incurs substantial communication overhead due to the exchange of high-dimensional feature representations and often assumes idealized bandwidth and synchronization, limiting practical deployment. We address these limitations by shifting collaboration from perception to the prediction module and introducing a late-fusion framework for shared forecasts. The framework is model-agnostic and treats collaborating vehicles as independent asynchronous agents. We evaluate the approach on the OPV2V, V2V4Real, and DeepAccident datasets, comparing individual and collaborative forecasting. Across all datasets, late fusion consistently reduces miss rate and improves trajectory success rate ($\mathrm{TSR}_{0.5}$), defined as the fraction of ground-truth agents with final displacement error below 0.5 m. On the real-world V2V4Real dataset, collaborative prediction improves the success rate by $1.69\%$ and $1.22\%$ for both intelligent vehicles, respectively, compared with individual forecasting.