US Patent 9336436 Methods and systems for pedestrian avoidance

An autonomous vehicle configured to avoid pedestrians using hierarchical cylindrical features. An example method involves: (a) receiving, at a computing device, range data corresponding to an environment of a vehicle, and the range data comprises a plurality of data points; (b) detecting, by the computing device, one or more subsets of data points from the plurality of data points that are indicative of an upper-body region of a pedestrian, and the upper-body region may comprise parameters corresponding to one or more of a head and a chest of the pedestrian; and (c) in response to detecting the one or more subsets of data points, determining a position of the pedestrian relative to the vehicle.