Smooth trajectory planning for fully automated passengers vehicles - Spline and clothoid based methods and its simulation

A new approach for mobility, providing an alternative to the private passenger car, by offering the same flexibility but with much less nuisances, is emerging, based on fully automated electric vehicles. A fleet of such vehicles might be an important element in a novel individual, door-to-door, transportation system to the city of tomorrow. For fully automated operation, trajectory planning methods that produce smooth trajectories, with low associated accelerations and jerk, for providing passenger's comfort, are required. This paper addresses this problem proposing an approach that consists of introducing a velocity planning stage to generate adequate time sequences for usage in the interpolating curve planners. Moreover, the generated speed profile can be merged into the trajectory for usage in trajectory-tracking tasks like it is described in this paper, or it can be used separately (from the generated 2D curve) for usage in path-following tasks. Three trajectory planning methods, aided by the speed profile planning, are analysed from the point of view of passengers' comfort, implementation easiness, and trajectory tracking.