US 2024/0174256 A1Published application

Vehicle trajectory tree search for off-route driving maneuvers

AssigneeZoox, Inc.

InventorsSriram Narayanan, Steven Cheng Qian

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Abstract

Techniques are discussed herein for generating trajectories for controlling motion and/or other behaviors of vehicles in driving environments. In particular, techniques are described herein for using a tree search to determine a trajectory for a vehicle to join a driving route from an initial vehicle state off of the driving route structure. A vehicle computing system may determine various candidate trajectories, including trajectories based on an off-route inertial reference frame, additional trajectories based on the route structure, perturbed trajectories, etc. The set of candidate trajectories may be optimized and/or filtered based on objects in the environment, and the corresponding candidate actions may be used to generate a search tree between the off-route vehicle state and an on-route target state. The costs associated with the candidate actions may be evaluated iteratively to determine a minimum cost traversal of the tree, representing a control trajectory to allow the vehicle to join the driving route structure.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A vehicle comprising:

one or more processors;
and
one or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
determining an absence of a lane constraint associated with a current vehicle state of the vehicle;
determining a target vehicle state for the vehicle associated with a portion of the environment having a lane constraint;
determining a first candidate path for the vehicle, based at least in part on:
the current vehicle state,
the target vehicle state,
a distance between the current vehicle state and the driving route,
a heading associated with the current vehicle state, and
a direction associated with the target vehicle state;
determining, based at least in part on the current vehicle state and the target vehicle state, a second candidate path for the vehicle, wherein determining the second candidate path is based at least in part on a route-based reference system associated with the lane constraint;
determining, based at least in part on the first candidate path, a first candidate action for controlling motion of the vehicle;
determining, based at least in part on the second candidate path, a second candidate action for controlling motion of the vehicle;
generating, based at least in part on the first candidate action and the second candidate action, a tree structure;
determining a traversal of the tree structure associated with a minimum cost;
determining a control path for the vehicle, based at least in part on the traversal of the tree structure;
and
controlling the vehicle based at least in part on the control path.

16 more elements

One or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions executable by a processor, wherein the instructions, when executed, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

determining a first candidate trajectory for a vehicle, based at least in part on a current vehicle state and a target vehicle state, wherein the target vehicle state is on a driving lane of a driving route associated with the vehicle, and the current vehicle state is off of the driving lane;
determining, based at least in part on the first candidate trajectory, a first candidate action for controlling motion of the vehicle;
generating, based at least in part on the first candidate action, a tree structure;
determining a control trajectory for the vehicle, based at least in part on the tree structure;
and
controlling the vehicle based at least in part on the control trajectory.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.