Trajectory Planning for Automated Merging on Highways

This article introduces a new approach for trajectory planning for merging on highways. The aim of the algorithm, is to find a comfortable driving strategy to merge in a gap on the target lane. Therfore, the proposed algorithm determines a bunch of trajectories to reach surrounding gaps. The trajectory with the lowest costs for each gap is chosen. To obtain the longitudinal component of the trajectory, a five-part section-wise defined polynomial in Frenet space is used to generate comfortable driving behaviour, with as few changes in the acceleration profile as possible. Based on the prediction of surrounding traffic, different variations of deceleration and acceleration are combined. For each longitudinal part, a lateral component to perform a lane change into the target gap is evaluated. The concept allows to evaluate the influence of the longitudinal driving strategy on the dynamics required to change lanes. The algorithm is evaluated in a MATLAB simulation including a runtime estimation.