US Patent 9633564 Determining changes in a driving environment based on vehicle behavior

A method and apparatus are provided for determining whether a driving environment has changed relative to previously stored information about the driving environment. The apparatus may include an autonomous driving computer system configured to detect one or more vehicles in the driving environment, and determine corresponding trajectories for those detected vehicles. The autonomous driving computer system may then compare the determined trajectories to an expected trajectory of a hypothetical vehicle in the driving environment. Based on the comparison, the autonomous driving computer system may determine whether the driving environment has changed and/or a probability that the driving environment has changed, relative to the previously stored information about the driving environment.