Cooperative Driving of Automated Vehicles Using B-Splines for Trajectory Planning

Vehicle automation is used to increase traffic throughput and road safety. Automated vehicles should be highly versatile to navigate on both highways and urban roads. To do so, fully automated autonomous vehicles often adopt motion planners to ensure collision-free and comfortable trajectories. In contrast, in cooperative driving, feedback control is often used to achieve string-stable vehicle-following at very short inter-vehicle distances. In this work, the gap between cooperative vehicle following and trajectory planning is bridged, by using a trajectory planner to generate cooperative trajectories, such that the versatility of an autonomous vehicle is retained, but cooperation is included. The presented method uses B-splines to generate cooperative trajectories. Simulations are used to demonstrate that even under large communication delays, string stable behaviour can be achieved. The use of parametrized trajectories in the form of B-splines ensures only a small number of parameters needs to be communicated between vehicles.

Automated summary

In this research, a method is proposed to combine the flexibility and cooperation of autonomous vehicles by using a trajectory planner to generate cooperative trajectories. B-splines are used to ensure string stable behavior even under large communication delays. The use of parametrized trajectories allows for only a small number of parameters to be communicated between vehicles.