Formalizing Traffic Rules for Machine Interpretability

Autonomous vehicles need to be designed to abide by the same rules that humans follow. This is challenging, as traffic rules are fuzzy and not specified at a level of detail to be comprehensible for machines. Without proper formalization, satisfaction cannot be implemented in a planning component, nor can it be monitored and verified during simulation or testing. However, no work has provided a complete set of machine-interpretable traffic rules for a given operational driving domain. We propose a methodology on how to legally analyze and formalize traffic rules in a formal language. We use Linear Temporal Logic as a formal specification language to describe temporal behavior, thus capable of capturing a wide range of traffic rules. We contribute a formalized set of traffic rules for single-direction carriageways, such as on highways. We then test the effectiveness of our formalized rules on a public dataset.