Safe and Online MPC for Managing Safety and Comfort of Autonomous Vehicles in Urban Environment

Abstract

In this paper is presented a linear MPC controller design for autonomous cars navigation. It combines both the lateral and longitudinal control. The MPC cost function has been designed to account for human driving behaviours, i.e., it smoothes out coarse reference trajectories. Furthermore, a safety monitoring module has been implemented. It computes an estimated time before reaching an unacceptable situation (w.r.t. comfort constraints and tracking performance) under the current tracking conditions. The overall benefit of this controller is to guarantee trajectory smoothness while outputting information on its performance. This information will later be used to re-plan safe trajectories in dynamic environments. The proposed linear MPC controller has been tested in a typical urban scenario based on a realistic simulator.