Path Planning for Autonomous Driving with Curvature-considered Quadratic Optimization

Path planning is a crucial module in motion planning for autonomous driving, aiming at generating kinematically feasible and collision-free paths. Furthermore, the smoothness of generated path is significant for passengers’ comfortable feelings. In this paper, we propose an improved quadratic programming approach that generates optimal paths in urban structure scenarios with the Frenét frame, taking the cost of the path curvature into consideration explicitly. The proposed second-order Taylor-expansion estimation of the path curvature with the lateral spatial parameters can reflect the actual change of path curvature. Various simulated scenarios verify the effectiveness of our proposed method and the improvement of path quality by adding the curvature objective in the optimization procedure. The source code is released as an open-source package for the community.