Trajectory Planning for Autonomous High-Speed Overtaking in Structured Environments using Robust MPC

Abstract

Automated vehicles are increasingly getting mainstreamed and this has pushed development of systems for autonomous manoeuvring (e.g., lane-change, merge, overtake, etc.) to the forefront. A novel framework for situational awareness and trajectory planning to perform autonomous overtaking in high-speed structured environments (e.g., highway, motorway) is presented in this paper. A combination of a potential field like function and reachability sets of a vehicle are used to identify safe zones on a road that the vehicle can navigate towards. These safe zones are provided to a tube-based robust model predictive controller as reference to generate feasible trajectories for combined lateral and longitudinal motion of a vehicle. The strengths of the proposed framework are: (i) it is free from nonconvex collision avoidance constraints, (ii) it ensures feasibility of trajectory even if decelerating or accelerating while performing lateral motion, and (iii) it is real-time implementable. The ability of the proposed framework to plan feasible trajectories for highspeed overtaking is validated in a high-fidelity IPG CarMaker and Simulink co-simulation environment