SUMMARY
For future’s highly automated road vehicles, dynamically feasible, comfortable, and customizable trajectories must be planned in order to ensure the maximum level of road safety and passenger satisfaction. To fulfil these requirements, a constrained nonlinear optimization based trajectory planning method was developed, which is generating the trajectories by the model-based prediction of the vehicle’s motion. The evaluation of vehicle dynamics in closed loop with the trajectory tracking control can also allow the direct planning of controller reference signals, which is unique in literature. The aim of this paper is to investigate the sensitivity and robustness of the planner method, based on simulation results, taking special account of the impact of deviations from normal operating circumstances such as rapid changes in road surface. These examinations are almost always missing from current works, although they are indispensable for safe and feasible motion planning under wide variety of road and environmental conditions. Firstly, the developed trajectory planning algorithm is described. Then the performance of the method is examined in terms of changes in the parameter values of the applied model of vehicle dynamics, tire-road contact, and the optimization problem setup. Finally, the performance, sensitivity, and robustness of the presented trajectory planning algorithm is evaluated based on the simulation results, and the conclusions are summarized.