Optimization-based Motion Planning in Virtual Driving Scenarios with Application to Communicating Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: The paper addresses the problem of providing suitable reference trajectories in motion planning problems for autonomous vehicles. Among the various approaches to compute a reference trajectory, our aim is to find those trajectories which optimize a given performance criterion, for instance fuel consumption, comfort, safety, time, and obey constraints, e.g. collision avoidance, safety regions, control bounds. This task can be approached by geometric shortest path problems or by optimal control problems, which need to be solved efficiently. To this end we use direct discretization schemes and model-predictive control in combination with sensitivity updates to predict optimal solutions in the presence of perturbations. Applications arising in autonomous driving are presented. In particular, a distributed control algorithm for traffic scenarios with several autonomous vehicles that use car-to-car communication is introduced.