On-Road Trajectory Planning for General Autonomous Driving with Enhanced Tunability

Abstract

In order to achieve smooth autonomous driving in real-life urban and highway environments, a motion planner must generate trajectories that are locally smooth and responsive (reactive), and at the same time, far-sighted and intelligent (deliberative). Prior approaches achieved both planning qualities for full-speed-range operations at a high computational cost. Moreover, the planning formulations were mostly a trajectory search problem based on a single weighted cost, which became hard to tune and highly scenario-constrained due to overfitting. In this paper, a pipelined (phased) framework with tunable planning modules is proposed for general on-road motion planning to reduce the computational overhead and improve the tunability of the planner.