# Occlusion-Aware Contingency Safety-Critical Planning for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Safe and Nonconservative Contingency Planning for Autonomous Vehicles via Online Learning-Based Reachable Set Barriers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07464/) (2025)
- [REBA: A Revealed Belief Automaton Framework for Online Planning in Continuous POMDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21971/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ensuring safe driving while maintaining travel efficiency for autonomous vehicles in dynamic and occluded environments is a critical challenge. This paper proposes an occlusion-aware contingency safety-critical planning approach for real-time autonomous driving. Leveraging reachability analysis for risk assessment, forward reachable sets of phantom vehicles are used to derive risk-aware dynamic velocity boundaries. These velocity boundaries are incorporated into a biconvex nonlinear programming (NLP) formulation that formally enforces safety using spatiotemporal barrier constraints, while simultaneously optimizing exploration and fallback trajectories within a receding horizon planning framework. To enable real-time computation and coordination between trajectories, we employ the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the biconvex NLP problem into low-dimensional convex subproblems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulations and real-world experiments in occluded intersections. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced safety and improved travel efficiency, enabling real-time safe trajectory generation in dynamic occluded intersections under varying obstacle conditions. The project page is available at https://zack4417.github.io/oacp-website/.
