Enhancing Passenger Comfort and Safeness in the Local Path Planning Strategy for Autonomous Road Vehicles Operating in New Capital City of Indonesia

The Indonesian government plans to move the capital city to East Kalimantan in 2024, focusing on developing a modern capital. Its implementation includes using autonomous vehicles to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of urban transportation. This study proposes a strategy to enhance passenger comfort and safeness in the local path planning for autonomous vehicles operating in urban environments. This approach is based on running the path planning algorithm in the configuration time space. Enhancing the safeness in the local path planning can be obtained because path planning in the configuration time-space involves predicting the movement of other vehicles, involving factors of uncertainty and variability, and considering safe distances from other vehicles. Enhancing comfort in local path planning can be obtained because it involves limiting speed and acceleration by the level of passenger comfort and smoothing to produce smooth acceleration and deceleration. Our path planning algorithm is the hybridization of Rapidly-exploring Random Tree with Ant Colonies Systems (RRT-ACS) and bidirectional rule templates. Path Planning in the Configuration Time-Space (PP+CTS) is the name of this proposed method. Several experiments were carried out to validate this proposed method. The experimental results show that the PP+CTS method can produce faster, safer, and more comfortable results. Therefore, this method is suitable for autonomous vehicles operating in a dynamic environment and can contribute to developing a more efficient future transportation system for the new Indonesian capital.