Seoul National University Unveils SafeDrive: A Novel End-to-End Autonomous Driving Model Optimizing Route Selection via Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning

A research team led by Professor Jun Won Choi from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University has developed SafeDrive, an end-to-end autonomous driving AI model. The model employs a "fine-grained safety reasoning" approach, quantitatively evaluating the safety of multiple candidate driving trajectories based on perception outputs, ranking them accordingly, and selecting the optimal path to enhance both decision-making safety and interpretability. The SafeDrive model has been integrated into the EAD (Evolutionary Autonomous Driving) framework—a reference model for commercializing end-to-end autonomous driving spearheaded by Seoul National University with support from Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. The research team is currently collaborating with Korean autonomous driving companies to conduct validation studies and advance real-world vehicle deployment of this technology. Choi stated that the team will continue optimizing the EAD model’s performance, aiming to achieve full-scale commercialization of end-to-end autonomous driving using larger and self-collected datasets. They also plan to build an open ecosystem to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among academia, industry, and research institutions.