Vehicle trajectory tree search for off-route driving maneuvers

Abstract

Techniques are discussed herein for generating trajectories for controlling motion and/or other behaviors of vehicles in driving environments. In particular, techniques are described herein for using a tree search to determine a trajectory for a vehicle to join a driving route from an initial vehicle state off of the driving route structure. A vehicle computing system may determine various candidate trajectories, including trajectories based on an off-route inertial reference frame, additional trajectories based on the route structure, perturbed trajectories, etc. The set of candidate trajectories may be optimized and/or filtered based on objects in the environment, and the corresponding candidate actions may be used to generate a search tree between the off-route vehicle state and an on-route target state. The costs associated with the candidate actions may be evaluated iteratively to determine a minimum cost traversal of the tree, representing a control trajectory to allow the vehicle to join the driving route structure.