A Mixed Receding/Shrinking Horizon MPC for Trajectory Planning at on-Ramp Merging Maneuver

This paper presents a solution to an on-ramp merging trajectory planning problem within a multiple target vehicles environment by employing model predictive control principles. The shrinking horizon MPC (SHMPC) scheme is used to guarantee that the optimal trajectories are selected among the available gaps into which the ego vehicle can merge. For each trajectory, a time-varying terminal set is used to ensure recursive feasibility and to fulfill the safety and obstacle avoidance constraints. To enhance computational efficiency, a procedure is proposed for defining the terminal set to be as large as possible, derived from the offline-calculated maximum controlled invariant set. We present a simple decision mechanism, accounting for safety, comfort, and efficiency. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution by applying it to two different scenarios.