3DOP: Comfort-oriented Motion Planning for Automated Vehicles with Active Suspensions

Motion comfort is the basis of many societal benefits promised by automated driving and motion planning is primarily responsible for this. By planning the spatial trajectory and the velocity profile, motion planners can significantly enhance motion comfort, ideally without sacrificing time efficiency. Active suspensions can push the boundary further by enabling additional degrees of freedom in the controllable vehicle motions. In this paper, we propose to integrate the planning of roll motion into an optimization-based motion planning algorithm called 3DOP(3 Degrees-of-Freedom Optimal Planning), where the conflicting objectives of comfort and time efficiency are optimized. The feasibility of the planned motion is verified in a realistic simulation environment, where feedforward-proportional control suffices to track the speed, path, and roll references. The proposed scheme achieves a significant reduction of motion discomfort, namely by up to 28.1% over the variant without controllable roll motion, or up to 34.2% over an acceleration-bounded driver model. The results suggest considerable potential for improving motion comfort by equipping automated vehicles with active suspensions.