A Primitive Comparison for Traffic-Free Path Planning

Motion planning in on-road urban driving is usually stated as an optimization problem in a multi-dimensional space that presents a high complexity in obtaining a global optimal solution. In that sense, a great amount of different approaches to solve this problem coexist in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work studying how to choose the best strategy in this multi-dimensional space. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of interpolation curve planners based on continuous curvature Bézier compositions. To that end, a comparison framework to benchmark different path-planning primitives for on-road urban driving is proposed, and the evaluation of different primitive configurations and optimization techniques for path-planning is carried out. In addition, the results are openly published together with its consequent analysis, based on a set of key performance indicators related to the aforementioned main features.