A Hierarchical Multi-Vehicle Coordinated Motion Planning Method Based on Interactive Spatio-Temporal Corridors

Abstract

Multi-vehicle coordinated motion planning has always been challenged to safely and efficiently resolve conflicts under non-holonomic dynamic constraints. Constructing spatial-temporal corridors for multi-vehicle can decouple the high-dimensional conflicts and further reduce the difficulty of obtaining feasible trajectories. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical multi-vehicle coordinated motion planning method based on interactive spatio-temporal corridors (ISTCs). In the first layer, based on the initial guidance trajectories, Mixed Integer Quadratic Programming is designed to construct ISTCs capable of resolving conflicts in generic multi-vehicle scenarios. And then in the second layer, Non-Linear Programming is settled to generate in-corridor trajectories that satisfy the vehicle dynamics. By introducing ISTCs, the multi-vehicle coordinated motion planning problem is able to be decoupled into single-vehicle trajectory optimization problems, which greatly decentralizes the computational pressure and has great potential for real-world applications. Besides, the proposed method searches for feasible solutions in the 3-D <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(x,y,t)$</tex-math></inline-formula> configuration space, preserving more possibilities than the traditional velocity-path decoupling method. Simulated experiments in unsignalized intersection and challenging dense scenarios have been conducted to verify the feasibility and adaptability of the proposed framework.