Trajectory Reference Generation and Guidance Control for Autonomous Vehicle Lane Change Maneuver

One of the expected tasks that autonomous vehicle may do is driving on highway which makes performing lane change maneuvers inevitable. In order to ensure the safety of the lane change, the contingency planning approach must generate smooth and feasible local trajectory adequate for overtaking or collision avoidance applications. This paper presents a method to carry out a lane change maneuver based on a sigmoid function trajectory. The main contribution of this paper is to provide an envelope of the set of the feasible parameterized sigmoid functions based on vehicle dynamics and geometric constraints. The few parameters used in the trajectory adjustment make the lane change maneuver safe, comfortable laterally and applicable in real-time. The proposed lateral controller switches between attenuating the lateral error and the orientation error to better track the desired reference trajectory. CarMaker simulation results show the applicability of the proposed approach.