Autonomous overtaking maneuver design based on follow the gap method

This paper proposes a solution for one of the most important components of autonomous driving: "overtaking maneuver". Follow the Gap method (FGM) is one of the most popular obstacle avoidance algorithms and directly obtains steering angle from position of the obstacles around. This paper is the first study using FGM to solve the overtaking problem. Different from previous studies where a trajectory is planned and then a controller is designed to track it; we use FGM for motion planning and control together. This paper focuses on overtaking maneuver in a challenging environment like highway traffic where the safety and fast response are the key factors. After we adapt the FGM to overtaking problem, we compare it with an existing overtaking method X-sin functions from literature. Since X-sin functions method requires a path tracker (controller), Stanley method is combined with X-sin functions. At the end of this work, we show several advantages of FGM comparing to the X-sin functions based overtaking approach.