Planning the path for a Self-Driving Car on a Highway

Path planning is the brain of a self driving car. It is the module that tries to replicate the thinking and decision making we humans do while driving -- read the map, analyze our environment (other vehicles and pedestrians) and decide the optimal action based on safety, speed and traffic rules. For my first project of term 3 in the Udacity Self Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, I implemented a highway path planner to drive a car on a simulated high way with multiple lanes and traffic. See the gif and video below. The simulator provides us with current position and velocity of our car and traffic at each time step back and in turn we send to the simulator the next x and y positions so it can drive the car there.