System, method, and computer program product for topological planning in autonomous driving using bounds representations

Abstract

Provided are autonomous vehicles and methods of controlling autonomous vehicles through topological planning with bounds, including receiving map data and sensor data, expanding a topological tree by adding a plurality of nodes to represent a plurality of actions associated with the plurality of constraints, generating a bound based on a constraint in the geographic area, the bound associated with an action for navigating the autonomous vehicle relative to the at least one constraint, storing the bound in a central bound storage, linking a set of bounds of a tree node to the bound via a bound identifier, wherein the first bound is initially linked as an active bound, or alternatively, as an inactive bound after determining it is not the most restrictive bound at any sample index, and control the autonomous vehicle based on the topological tree, to navigate the plurality of constraints.