Clothoid-Based Speed Profiler and Control for Autonomous Driving

This paper presents a method for optimal speed profile generation in specified clothoid-based paths with known semantic--maximum speed and longitudinal and lateral acceleration--and geometric information. A clothoid can be described using only its kink-points information, i.e. the points defining the start and end of a clothoid. Using the clothoid-based path representation, we formulate the speed profile generation as a convex optimization problem where the objective is to produce a smooth speed that is close to the maximum allowed speed. The vehicle and the road profile define the constraints of the problem. Furthermore, we develop a longitudinal controller by using the speed profiler in a receding-horizon fashion. Thus, we only consider a finite horizon when computing the optimal inputs every sampling time and, in addition, the longitudinal controller also takes into account the newest prediction available from measurements and from the lateral controller. We present simulations that demonstrate the ability of the method to generate safe and feasible speed profiles and the tracking of those by the longitudinal controller. We also study the influence of the clothoid-based path representation in the optimality of the speed profile obtained. We show that we can get a very good suboptimal speed profile approximation with few more points than the kink-points. In addition, we analyze the influence of an acceleration penalization factor in the smoothness of the speed profiler. The higher the acceleration penalization the smoother and the further from the maximum allowed speed is the speed profile.