Design of A Two-point Steering Path Planner Using Geometric Control
This work addresses path planning for autonomous vehicles, offering an incremental improvement by applying geometric control to enhance steering efficiency and comfort.
The paper tackles the problem of path planning for lane-keeping and lane-change in autonomous driving by designing a two-point steering path planner based on geometric control, which results in a smaller steering radius than the target lane's intrinsic radius, enabling higher vehicle speeds and improved passenger comfort on winding roads.
For lateral vehicle dynamics, planning trajectories for lane-keeping and lane-change can be generalized as a path planning task to stabilize a vehicle onto a target lane, which is a fundamental element in nowadays autonomous driving systems. On the other hand, two-point steering for lane-change and lane-keeping has been investigated by researchers from psychology as a sensorimotor mechanism of human drivers. In the first part of this paper, using knowledge of geometric control, we will first design a path planner which satisfies five design objectives: generalization for different vehicle models, convergence to the target lane, optimality, safety in lane-change maneuver and low computational complexity. Later, based on this path planner, a two-point steering path planner will be proposed and it will be proved rigorously that this two-point steering path planner possesses the advantage--steering radius of the planned trajectory is smaller than the intrinsic radius of reference line of the target lane. This advantage is also described as "corner-cutting" in driving. The smaller driving radius of the trajectory will result in higher vehicle speed along the winding roads and more comfortness for the passengers.