Real-Time Motion Planning Approach for Automated Driving in Urban Environments

Autonomous vehicles must be able to react in a timely manner to typical and unpredictable situations in urban scenarios. In this connection, motion planning algorithms play a key role as they are responsible of ensuring driving safety and comfort while producing human-like trajectories in a wide range of driving scenarios. Typical approaches for motion planning focus on trajectory optimization by applying computation-intensive algorithms, rather than finding a balance between optimatily and computing time. However, for on-road automated driving at medium and high speeds, determinism is necessary at high sampling rates. This work presents a trajectory planning algorithm that is able to provide safe, human-like and comfortable trajectories by using cost-effective primitives evaluation based on quintic Bézier curves. The proposed method is able to consider the kinodynamic constrains of the vehicle while reactively handling dynamic real environments in real-time. The proposed motion planning strategy has been implemented in a real experimental platform and validated in different real operating environments, successfully overcoming typical urban traffic scenes where both static and dynamic objects are involved.