Design Space of Behaviour Planning for Autonomous Driving

--We explore the complex design space of behaviour planning for autonomous driving. Design choices that successfully address one aspect of behaviour planning can critically constrain others. T o aid the design process, in this work we decompose the design space with respect to important choices arising from the current state of the art approaches, and describe the resulting tradeoffs. In doing this, we also identify interesting directions of future work. In this work we consider the design space [1] of behaviour planning--high level decision making--for autonomous driving. To simplify the design process, we decompose the design space into three principal axes of design choices, based on our practical experience [2] and with reference to the current state of the art. Within each axis, we discuss the inevitable qualitative tradeoffs that exist and review the relevant literature. We illustrate our decomposition using feature diagrams [3]. In doing this, we identify potentially interesting areas of research within the behaviour planning design space. The motivation of our decomposition is as follows. Human driver control actions are continuous, yet driving also contains discrete episodes, arising from road connectivity, signs, signals, road-user interactions, etc. The vehicle must nevertheless follow a smooth continuous trajectory on the road.