Trajectory based motion planning for on-ramp merging-situations considering extended evaluation criteria

In recent years, great progress in the area of automated and autonomous driving has been made. Nevertheless, key areas such as situation awareness and maneuvering still remain challenging, especially in urban areas and at highway junctions. In the following work a novel trajectory planner for automated lane merge situations will be presented. While our approach is adaptable to any merge scenario, we focus in this work on the most challenging maneuver, the on-ramp freeway merging. We present novel metrics for safety and comfort, such as merge-duration and lane usage and combine them with established key metrics such as time-to-collision, acceleration etc. Using these metrics, we validate our approach in a 3D physics simulation for two scenarios: dense highway traffic and highD-scenario based on real vehicle data.