Novel steering profile for efficient trajectory planning

Abstract

Any system that realizes the function of autonomous driving has to perform the task of constructing a continuous trajectory that can be followed by the autonomous vehicle. Many planning approaches may benefit from an efficient algorithm that is able to construct a continuous trajectory which satisfies the initial and target poses of the vehicle as well as the vehicle actuator states at the boundaries. We present an approach to planning motion trajectories that solves this problem. Our method uses a steering profile which is inspired by human driving behavior. Careful parametrization of the steering profile allows designing of an efficient numerical solver to compute the values of the profile parameters for a wide range of possible vehicle target states. In addition, the comprehensible interpretation of the profile parameters may be exploited by planners that rely on trajectory sampling with varying boundary conditions at the trajectory end point.