Improved manoeuvring of autonomous passenger vehicles: Simulations and field results

Abstract

This paper describes a novel manoeuvre planning method to attenuate disturbances acting on occupants of autonomous cars as a result of driving behaviour. New research findings suggested that the passengers in autonomous cars might be more prone to motion sickness and thus overall discomfort. The proposed approach is based on a recently developed novel continuous B-spline path smoothing algorithm for car-like steered robots. Two algorithms are designed for urban driving scenarios and steering between two predefined poses. The resulting paths avoid abrupt changes in steering and longitudinal velocity, by maintaining curvature and its high order continuity. We show that this lead to reduced high frequency disturbances in steering and resulting load disturbances on passengers. The presented novel B-spline manoeuvres outperform other planning methods by reducing lateral acceleration and yaw disturbances. New approach was verified by rigorous simulations, numerical and field experimentation. Tests were repeated for a number of different paths and velocities. The reported results are the first spline based parameterisation methods practically applied for autonomous cars planning and re-planning, then validated using both noisy actuation simulations and field experiments.