SLAS: Speed and Lane Advisory System for Highway Navigation

Abstract

This paper proposes a hierarchical autonomous vehicle navigation architecture, composed of a high-level speed and lane advisory system (SLAS) coupled with low-level trajectory generation and trajectory following modules. Specifically, we target a multi-lane highway driving scenario where an autonomous ego vehicle navigates in traffic. We propose a novel receding horizon mixed-integer optimization based method for SLAS with the objective to minimize travel time while accounting for passenger comfort. We further incorporate various modifications in the proposed approach to improve the overall computational efficiency and achieve real-time performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in contrast to the existing methods, when applied in conjunction with state-of-the-art trajectory generation and trajectory following frameworks, in a CARLA simulation environment.