Road Boundary Modeling for Autonomous Bus Docking Subject to Rectangular Geometry Constraints

This paper studies the optimization problem of autonomous bus parallel parking subjected to rectangular geometry constraints. The parking space is a non-smooth and non-convex irregular polygon. We propose a novel method for modeling geometry constraints, which allows using the exact non-smooth parking space, while still being able to formulate the problem as a smooth nonlinear program. The focus of this paper is to compare our method to two other approaches of modeling rectangular geometry constraints, where one uses mixed-integers while the other approximates the rectangle as a smooth function. We show that our novel method prevents collisions and requires shorter computation time, where collision constraints are imposed on a limited number of points on the vehicle contour.