OpenPlanner 2.0: The Portable Open Source Planner for Autonomous Driving Applications

There are few open source autonomous driving planners that are general enough to be used directly, or which could be easily customized to suit a particular application. OpenPlanner 1.0 was introduced back in 2017 to fill this gap. It was developed and integrated with the open source autonomous driving framework Autoware. Since then, many improvements have been introduced, following the original design goals. In this paper, the basic design will be re-introduced along with the latest developed technologies. The new planner is called OpenPlanner 2.0 and includes several new techniques such as multiple HD road network map formats support, trajectory and behavior estimation, planning based HMI support, path generation using kinematics based motion simulation and lane change behavior. OpenPlanner 2.0 is already attracting attention from the autonomous driving research and development communities; universities and companies. Several projects are using and contributing to its code base. Some of these applications will be discussed in this paper as well. A comparison between OpenPlanner and other open source planners showing the aspects where it is superior is also presented.