Local Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Trucks in Collision Avoidance Maneuvers with Rollover Prevention

The local trajectory planning is one of the important techniques for autonomous trucks. However, in the relevant researches, the vehicle planar dynamics/motion constraints are typically considered, and few studies investigated the impact of rollover with respect to the planned trajectory, which is more significant for commercial trucks than passenger vehicles. On the other hand, many trajectory planning approaches isolate path planning and velocity planning to simplify the problem. To address these issues, a local trajectory planning for collision avoidance maneuvers of autonomous trucks is proposed in this study. The whole collision avoidance maneuver is considered as a three-step procedure, including braking, lane changing, and acceleration. The path planning is integrated with the velocity planning to better preserve the optimality of the planning results. Specifically for autonomous trucks, rollover prevention is considered as an extra constraint to ensure vehicle stability and safety. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed trajectory planning strategy is evaluated by simulation results. The conclusion is that the integrated path and velocity planning together with the consideration of rollover prevention in the local trajectory planning is important to ensure the handling stability and safety as well as the efficiency of autonomous trucks.