Gap Closing for Cooperative Driving in Automated Vehicles using B-splines for Trajectory Planning

Recently, increasing interest has been shown in cooperative driving and platooning, as they show great potential for increasing the road throughput, by both increasing road capacity and preventing so called `ghost' traffic jams. These cooperative vehicles make use of controllers or trajectory planners that achieve a certain spacing policy. However, these systems may result in large accelerations when the host vehicle is trying to close a gap to a preceding vehicle, leading to uncomfortable responses. In this work, a trajectory planning method is presented that is able to smoothly close a large gap, by means of a time-varying spacing policy. The resulting trajectory planner is capable of both maintaining a desired spacing as well as closing a gap comfortably to a preceding vehicle.