Designing Safe Lane-Change Maneuvers Using an Explicit Path Planner

This paper addresses the problem of designing safe lane changing maneuvers for an autonomous vehicle. In the presence of neighboring vehicles, the work considers all collision possibilities in the scenario. As an explicit path planner, the four parameter logistic (4PL) curve is proposed as the solution. Analytic conditions for collision avoidance with respect to the neighboring vehicles are deduced in closed-form, and are expressed in the 2 dimensional design parameter space of 4PL curve. Feasible lane changing maneuvers are represented in this space as a set of points satisfying collision avoidance, and reachability constraints. Case studies are presented for various scenarios. The proposed method offers a deterministic, and computationally efficient approach for generating multiple feasible lane changing trajectories.