Novel method for speed adjustment of autonomous driving vehicles prior to lane change

A non-transitory machine-readable medium having instructions stored therein, which when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations for adjusting a vehicle speed prior to a lane change for an autonomous driving vehicle (ADV), the operations comprising:

• planning a hypothetical rough path without lane change;
• determining virtual non-blocking Station-Time (ST) boundaries of potentially interfering vehicles in a target lane, comprising shifting the hypothetical rough path to an ST coordinate system associated with the target lane;
• determining projected ST boundaries, comprising projecting the virtual non-blocking ST boundaries onto a real ST coordinate system associated with a current lane;
• determining residual ST boundaries, comprising keeping only part of the projected ST boundaries where t>t0, wherein t0 is a parameter;
• and
• performing speed optimization based on the residual ST boundaries.

A data processing system, comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory coupled to the processor to store instructions, which when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations for adjusting a vehicle speed prior to a lane change for an autonomous driving vehicle (ADV), the operations including
• planning a hypothetical rough path without lane change;
• determining virtual non-blocking Station-Time (ST) boundaries of potentially interfering vehicles in a target lane, comprising shifting the hypothetical rough path to an ST coordinate system associated with the target lane;
• determining projected ST boundaries, comprising projecting the virtual non-blocking ST boundaries onto a real ST coordinate system associated with a current lane;
• determining residual ST boundaries, comprising keeping only part of the projected ST boundaries where t>t0, wherein t0 is a parameter;
• and
• performing speed optimization based on the residual ST boundaries.