US Patent 10379538 Trajectory generation using motion primitives

In autonomous driving, it is often useful to plan trajectories in a curvilinear coordinate frame with respect to some reference trajectory, like a path produced by a hi-level route planner. This disclosure includes techniques for developing efficient approximate path coordinate motion primitives appropriate for fast planning in autonomous driving scenarios. These primitives are approximate in that particular quantities, like the path length, acceleration, and track offset trajectory, are known with some degree of certainty, and values that depend on the curvature of the reference path can be bound. Such approximate motion primitives can be used to control the autonomous vehicle to follow the trajectory in an environment.