A Generic Interface Enabling Combinations of State-of-the-Art Path Planning and Tracking Algorithms

In the development of Level 4 automated driving functions, very specific, but diverse, requirements with respect to the operational design domain have to be considered. In order to accelerate this development, it is advantageous to combine dedicated state-of-the-art software components, as building blocks in modular automated driving function architectures, instead of developing special solutions from scratch. However, e.g., in local motion planning and control, the combination of components is still limited in practice, due to necessary interface alignments, which might yield sub-optimal solutions and additional development overhead. The application of generic interfaces, which manage the data transfer between the software components, has the potential to avoid these drawbacks and hence, to further boost this development approach. This publication contributes such a generic interface concept between the local path planning and path tracking systems. The crucial point is a generalization of the lateral tracking error computation, based on an introduced error classification. It substantiates the integration of an internal reference path representation into the interface, to resolve the component interdependencies. The resulting, proposed interface enables arbitrary combinations of components from a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art path planning and tracking algorithms. Two interface implementations are finally applied in an exemplary automated driving function assembly task.