On XYZ-Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles with Active Suspension Systems

This paper addresses the xyz-motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles equipped with active suspension systems. A generic nonlinear optimization problem based on a 3D quarter car model is formulated, where vertical motion planning and the knowledge of road surface data are taken into consideration for planning the motion of the vehicle body in 3D space. A novel z-motion planning methodology is proposed and integrated with a sampling-based xyz-motion planning framework. Finally, simulated driving scenarios are presented to illustrate the advantages of using the proposed planning framework.