Road Boundary Modeling for Autonomous Bus Docking Subject to Rectangular Geometry Constraints

Paper i proceeding, 2021

This paper studies the optimization problem of autonomous bus parallel parking subjected to rectangular geometry constraints. The parking space is a non-smooth and non-convex irregular polygon. We propose a novel method for modeling geometry constraints, which allows using the exact non-smooth parking space, while still being able to formulate the problem as a smooth nonlinear program. The focus of this paper is to compare our method to two other approaches of modeling rectangular geometry constraints, where one uses mixed-integers while the other approximates the rectangle as a smooth function. We show that our novel method prevents collisions and requires shorter computation time, where collision constraints are imposed on a limited number of points on the vehicle contour.