Parsimonious disturbance-aware minimum-time planning with parametric uncertainty
Authors: Martino Gulisano, Matteo Masoni, Marco Gabiccini
Organizations: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Industriale, Universit`a di Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
Abstract
This study presents and validates a minimum-lap-time planning (MLTP) framework for motorsport applications that embeds robustness against both state disturbances and parameter uncertainty. The methodology builds upon a prior disturbance-aware framework that, at each track point, propagates stochastic vehicle dynamics over a short horizon and tightens tyre-friction constraints based on the worst-case scenario at horizon end. We extend the formulation to account for uncertainty in key vehicle parameters: moment of inertia, centre-of-mass position, and aerodynamic drag coefficient. To keep the extended formulation computationally tractable, a spatially selective, parsimonious activation strategy confines the robust constraints to the circuit segments where they are most critical. We demonstrate the improved driveability of the robust references by employing a model predictive controller (MPC) as a virtual test driver. For each reference, the same MPC drives a simulated FSAE (Formula SAE) car over 1000 runs on a representative Barcelona-Catalunya sector, with randomly realised impulsive disturbances and parameter scatter. We compare a nominal reference, planned without robustness, against its robust counterparts. The latter yield consistently fewer failed runs and, at a moderate sector-time cost, show tighter dispersion of key signals (vehicle inputs, axle saturations) around the reference values, evidence of better trackability.
Motion planning for autonomous driving must account for multi-modal uncertainty in both the intentions and trajectories of surrounding vehicles. Handling uncertainty in a worst-case manner guarantees robustness but often leads to excessive conservatism. Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) reduces trajectory-level conservatism through chance constraints, yet remains conservative with respect to intention uncertainty since constraints must hold across all intentions. We present a novel combination of SMPC and the branching structure, enabling the planner to generate distinct trajectories for different possible intentions while maintaining safety under trajectory uncertainty. A novel scenario clustering is proposed to merge prediction scenarios based on high-level decision similarity, thereby ensuring real-time tractability. Furthermore, an adaptive branching-time computation postpones commitment to separate plans until intention uncertainty is sufficiently reduced. Simulation studies in challenging highway scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method improves safety, reduces conservatism, and achieves real-time computational performance.
Zekun Xing, Ramkrishna Chaudhari, Marion Leibold +2
We investigate interactive trajectory planning subject to uncertainty in the decisions of surrounding agents. To control the ego-agent, we aim to first learn the decision distribution and solve a Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) problem. To account for errors in the learned distribution, we show that it is possible to utilize Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning in combination with Distributionally Robust (DR) optimization to obtain a solution which accounts for the errors induced by the learning model. The results indicate that our PAC learning-based DR-MPC framework provides a method to interpolate between a robust MPC and an omnipotent SMPC, based on the available number of samples.
Erik Börve, Nikolce Murgovski, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani +1
Kinodynamic planning for car-like vehicles on uneven terrain requires simultaneously optimizing competing objectives such as path efficiency and pose stability. This work presents an adaptive epsilon-constraint method integrated into a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, where the epsilon bounds are dynamically adjusted based on terrain descriptors to explore the Pareto front in real time. To capture vehicle-terrain dynamics, we develop a semi-parametric model combining analytical vehicle dynamics with a Sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) trained on the same terrain descriptors. The proposed epsilon-MPC is evaluated against MPPI and GAKD baselines, achieving a 94% navigation success rate while reducing maximum orientation deviation by 24% and improving multi-objective trade-off quality by 23%.