Sense Avoidance Constraints for Conflict Resolution between Autonomous Vehicles

Potential conflict situations between vehicles in the presence of obstacles are addressed by a decentralized approach imposing sense constraints, i.e., requiring that the vehicles circumvent an obstacle in a predetermined sense: either clockwise or counterclockwise. Model Predictive Control is used to plan trajectories using binary decision variables. In order to do that, a novel scheme to choose the feasible regions is proposed, and then obstacle avoidance constraints are encoded using tuples of binary decision variables. Sense constraints arise naturally as an extension of the proposed encoding scheme, allowing for decentralized planning, given that the vehicles agree on the required sense of circumvention. Simulation results are used to illustrate the benefits of the proposed method.