Car-following Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles in Multi-lane Environments

This paper suggests a car-following algorithm for urban environment, with multiple target candidates. Until now, advanced driver assistant systems (ADASs) and self-driving technologies have been researched to cope with diverse possible scenarios. Among them, car-following driving has been formed the groundwork of autonomous vehicle for its integrity and flexibility to other modes such as smart cruise system (SCC) and platooning. Although the field has a rich history, most researches has been focused on the shape of target trajectory, such as the order of interpolated polynomial, in simple single-lane situation. However, to introduce the car-following mode in urban environment, realistic situation should be reflected: multi-lane road, target's unstable driving tendency, obstacles. Therefore, the suggested car-following system includes both in-lane preceding vehicle and other factors such as side-lane targets. The algorithm is comprised of three parts: path candidate generation and optimal trajectory selection. In the first part, initial guesses of desired paths are calculated as polynomial function connecting host vehicle's state and vicinal vehicle's predicted future states. In the second part, final target trajectory is selected using quadratic cost function reflecting safeness, control input efficiency, and initial objective such as velocity. Finally, adjusted path and control input are calculated using model predictive control (MPC). The suggested algorithm's performance is verified using off-line simulation using Matlab; the results shows reasonable car-following motion planning.

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