An investigation on driver trajectory planning behaviors based on double lane change vehicle test data

Driver trajectory planning has been a key component in analyzing and simulating driver's maneuvers. This paper investigates driver's trajectory planning behavior based on vehicle test data of double lane change (DLC) maneuvers. Several hypotheses on driver's trajectory planning for the DLC maneuver are proposed and evaluated. Closed-loop simulations with look-ahead steering controllers consistently demonstrate that by simply fitting a trajectory to the actual trajectory and optimizing the control parameters of the look-ahead controller fail to capture drivers' steering behaviors. Based on the vehicle test data, the paper further hypothesizes that drivers use specific target points as references for control. Both open-loop analysis and closed-loop simulations indicate that, instead of planning and following a desired trajectory, drivers use moving targets along the lane to be changed to as control references during the DLC maneuver.