Speed Profile Optimization for Enhanced Passenger Comfort: An Optimal Control Approach

Autonomous vehicles are expected to start reaching the market within the next years. However in practical applications, navigation inside dynamic environments has to take many factors such as speed control, safety and comfort into consideration, which is more paramount for both passengers and pedestrians. In this paper, a novel speed profile planner based on an optimal control approach considering passenger comfort is proposed. The approach is accomplished by minimizing jerk under certain comfort constraints, which inherently gives a speed profile for the central nervous system to follow naturally. Imposed with the same conditions, the widely used Jerk Limitation method is interpreted as an equivalent of the minimum time control method, the latter being used to verify that our method can ensure better continuity and smoothness of the speed profiles. A validation test was specifically designed and performed in order to show the feasibility of our method.