An Ethical Decision Making Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles During an Inevitable Collision

In this paper, we discuss ethical dilemmas in autonomous driving, focusing on the decision-making processes during an inevitable collision. Different from previous comparisons and applications concentrating on ethics, our paper, taking the right in the constitution as the basis, innovatively incorporates Robert Alexy's Weight Formula into the design of the ethical algorithm for autonomous vehicles. We also introduce a new formula for calculating the survival rate, drawing on Rawls' Maximin Principle, with the goal of protecting the most vulnerable as much as possible. This new decision-making algorithm not only enables legal rights to be quantified in autonomous driving scenarios but also provides fresh insights and algorithm design methods for solving ethical dilemmas. Through this innovative approach, we provide a more objective, reasonable, and flexible framework for ethical decision-making in autonomous driving. We compared the traditional algorithm with our algorithm in a simulation environment, testing nine common hazardous scenarios. It is demonstrated that the EDM algorithm is able to reduce the loss of life by about 24.11%, showing its significant advantages in terms of safety performance.