NVIDIA DRIVE Planning

NVIDIA DRIVE^® Planning enables includes lane and route planning, as well as behavior planning and control functions. DRIVE Planning empowers developers to innovate behavior planning as well as control and actuation AV functionalities.

DRIVE Planning is suited for the following objective:

Create an origin-to-destination lane plan
Enable highway driving capabilities including automated cruise control (ACC), lane keeping (LK), lane changes, and lane merge handling

Details

Lane Planning

Lane Planning takes HD Map, localization, and route information data to create an origin-to-destination lane plan. Lane plan includes lane keeping, lane change, lane fork/split, and lane merge modes, and notifications of lane plan modes for behavior planning. This module provides estimated-time-of-arrival (ETA) to a destination, live tracking of vehicle location on the created lane plan, and performs online re-planning.

Behavior Planning and Control Functions

Behavior planning and control functions provide highway driving capabilities including automated cruise control (ACC), lane keeping (LK), lane changes, lane merge handling, speed adaptation in curves, and automatic speed limiting based on the map information.

Safety Force Field

Safety Force Field software is designed specifically for collision avoidance. It acts as an independent supervisor on the actions of the vehicle’s primary planning and control system, which could be either human-driven or autonomous. Specifically, SFF performs real-time double-checks of the controls that were chosen by the primary system. If SFF deems the controls to be unsafe, it will veto and correct the primary system’s decision.

An Introduction to Safety Force Field (PDF)

The Safety Force Field (Mathematical Deep Dive) (PDF)

Developing with DRIVE Planning

How to set up

You will need:

Steps:

Install DRIVE Planning via the SDK Manager.
Consult the Roadrunner* Users Guide (DRIVE AV → Roadrunner → Roadrunner Reference → Architecture) included in the DRIVE Software Documentation.

How to develop

Development Tasks	Getting Started
Experience DRIVE Planning using Roadrunner* application	If you are interested please contact your NVIDIA representative. This requires a vehicle outfitted with DRIVE Hyperion that’s capable of driving.

* Roadrunner is NVIDIA’s Autonomous Driving Application developed using the DriveWorks SDK

Additional Resources:

Blog: Eliminating Collisions with Safety Force Field
All NVIDIA DRIVE documentation can be found here: https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/documentation
Planning a Safer Path: Mathematically Proven and Validated in Simulation, NVIDIA Safety Force Field Protects Against Real-World Traffic