Manoeuvre-based trajectory planning for highly autonomous vehicles on real road with traffic

This paper presents the design and simulation results of a vehicle path planning algorithm that takes into account traffic and other obstacles on a highway. The proposed algorithm is designed to require little computation in order to achieve a real time evaluation in an embedded environment such as an ECU. Hence, the trajectory planning is proposed as a two-step algorithm. The first step defines at high level the feasible manoeuvres according to the environment. The output of this first step is a target group of manoeuvres such as accelerating, decelerating and changing lanes. The second step gives a lower level description of various trajectories within these given manoeuvres, computing all possibilities if the computation power is available. The output is a trajectory described in the vehicle frame that represents the recommended vehicle state (position, heading, speed and acceleration) for the next seconds.