Safe Planning for Self-Driving Via Adaptive Constrained ILQR

Abstract: Constrained Iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (CILQR), a variant of ILQR, has been recently proposed for motion planning problems of autonomous vehicles to deal with constraints such as obstacle avoidance and reference tracking. However, the previous work considers either deterministic trajectories or persistent prediction for target dynamical obstacles. The other drawback is lack of generality - it requires manual weight tuning for different scenarios. In this paper, two significant improvements are achieved. Firstly, a two-stage uncertainty-aware prediction is proposed. The short-term prediction with safety guarantee based on reachability analysis is responsible for dealing with extreme maneuvers conducted by target vehicles. The long-term prediction leveraging an adaptive least square filter preserves the long-term optimality of the planned trajectory since using reachability only for long-term prediction is too pessimistic and makes the planner over-conservative. Secondly, to allow a wider coverage over different scenarios and to avoid tedious parameter tuning case by case, this paper designs a scenario-based analytical function taking the states from the ego vehicle and the target vehicle as input, and carrying weights of a cost function as output. It allows the ego vehicle to execute multiple behaviors (such as lane-keeping and overtaking) under a single planner. We demonstrate safety, effectiveness, and real-time performance of the proposed planner in simulations.