Lane Change Maneuvers for Automated Vehicles

By considering a lane change maneuver as primarily a longitudinalmotion planning problem, this paper presents a lane change maneuveralgorithm with a pragmatic approach to determine an inter-vehicletraffic gap and time instance to perform the maneuver. The proposedapproach selects an appropriate inter-vehicle traffic gap and time instanceto perform the lane change maneuver by simply estimatingwhether there might exist a longitudinal trajectory which allows theautomated vehicle to safely perform the maneuver. The lane changemaneuver algorithm then proceeds to solve two loosely coupled convexquadratic programs to obtain the longitudinal trajectory to positionthe automated vehicle in the selected inter-vehicle traffic gap at thedesired time instance and the corresponding lateral trajectory. Simulationresults demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach toselect an appropriate inter-vehicle traffic gap and time instance to initializethe lateral motion of a lane change maneuver in various trafficscenarios. The real-time ability of the lane change maneuver algorithmto generate safe and smooth trajectories, is shown by experimental resultsof a Volvo V60 performing automated lane change maneuvers ona test track