Safe and Efficient Lane Change Maneuver for Obstacle Avoidance Inspired From Human Driving Pattern

One of the most important and fundamental topics in autonomous navigated vehicle research is the lane change maneuver for obstacle avoidance or overtaking maneuver. In the literature, the lane change maneuver path for car-like vehicles has widely been generated with geometrically smooth segments by solving boundary conditions under given constraints. This paper proposes a new method of continuous curvature path generation for the issue of lane change maneuver for obstacle avoidance while solving the clothoids composition problem using an efficient algorithmic procedure. Conventional approaches resorting to mathematical or engineering optimization without considering human-side activity and response may fail to deliver driving performance that is favorable to humans. The novelty of the proposed method lies in its adoption of a human driving pattern, which is non-symmetric and composed of two different modes of
avoidance
and
recovery
during the maneuver, and utilizes the property given by an appropriate iterative algorithm which takes into account all the constraints in order to solve the problem. As compared to conventional methods, the proposed method not only provides overall safety for obstacle avoidance, but also exhibits efficiency of increased comfort and human like steering motion during the lane change maneuver. The proposed path planning method is compared to other methods in order to validate its efficiency for safe and smooth obstacle avoidance maneuver.