Reactive Collision Avoidance

A system and method for reactive collision avoidance for autonomous vehicles for avoiding collisions with late-detected deterministic threats while minimizing deviations from planned trajectories and maximizing safety and comfort for vehicle occupants and others in the environment. Some implementations include receiving control commands for a planned path, determining distances to late-detected objects, determining at least one rate of change of a distance that exceeds a threshold, predicting that a collision will occur based on a collision function, and modifying at least one of the control commands to avoid the collision.