DL-AMP and DBTO: An Automatic Merge Planning and Trajectory Optimization and its Application in Autonomous Driving

This paper presents an automatic merging algorithm for autonomous driving vehicles, which decouples the specific motion planning problem into a Dual-Layer Automatic Merge Planning (DL-AMP) and a Descent-Based Trajectory Optimization (DBTO). This work leads to great improvements in finding the best merge opportunity, lateral and longitudinal merge planning and control, trajectory postprocessing and driving comfort. Our algorithm's robustness, adaptiveness and efficiency have been tested and validated both in simulations and on-road tests.