Maneuver-Based Trajectory Planning for Highly Autonomous Vehicles on Real Road With Traffic and Driver Interaction

This paper presents the design and first test on a simulator of a vehicle trajectory-planning algorithm that adapts to traffic on a lane-structured infrastructure such as highways. The proposed algorithm is designed to run on a fail-safe embedded environment with low computational power, such as an engine control unit, to be implementable in commercial vehicles of the near future. The target platform has a clock frequency of less than 150 MHz, 150 kB RAM of memory, and a 3-MB program memory. The trajectory planning is performed by a two-step algorithm. The first step defines the feasible maneuvers with respect to the environment, aiming at minimizing the risk of a collision. The output of this step is a target group of maneuvers in the longitudinal direction (accelerating or decelerating), in the lateral direction (changing lanes), and in the combination of both directions. The second step is a more detailed evaluation of several possible trajectories within these maneuvers. The trajectories are optimized to additional performance indicators such as travel time, traffic rules, consumption, and comfort. The output of this module is a trajectory in the vehicle frame that represents the recommended vehicle state (position, heading, speed, and acceleration) for the following seconds.