Generating a Racing Line for an Autonomous Racecar Using Professional Driving Techniques

During a race, professional drivers follow a racing line using specific maneuvers that allow them to utilize as much of the car’s tire force as possible. These lines could be used to create trajectories for obstacle avoidance in autonomous vehicles if they could be analytically defined. In fact, many of the techniques described by professional drivers can be expressed by a family of simple curves including straights, clothoids, and constant radius arcs. By comparing different members of this family of curves, different racing techniques can be examined. In particular, the differences between two phase and three phase corners described by professional drivers can be easily captured and analyzed in a single parameter. Experimental results on an autonomous race-car highlight the advantages of two phase cornering over three phase cornering and demonstrate the types of comparisons that can be made with this approach.