Safe Planning and Control Under Uncertainty for Self-Driving

Shivesh Khaitan, Qin Lin, John M. Dolan

Abstract: Motion planning under uncertainty is critical for safe self-driving. This paper proposes a unified obstacle avoidance framework that deals with 1) uncertainty in ego-vehicle motion; and 2) prediction uncertainty of dynamic obstacles from the environment. A two-stage traffic participant trajectory predictor comprising short-term and long-term prediction is used in the planning layer to generate safe but not over-conservative trajectories for the ego-vehicle. The prediction module cooperates well with existing planning approaches. Our work showcases its effectiveness in a Frenet frame planner. A robust controller using tube MPC guarantees safe execution of the trajectory in the presence of state noise and dynamic model uncertainty. A Gaussian process regression model is used for on-line identification of the uncertainty's bound. We demonstrate the effectiveness, safety, and real-time performance of our framework in the CARLA simulator.