Frenet Corridor Planner

Faizan Tariq, Goro Yeh, Avinash Singh, David Isele, Sangjae Bae
Honda Research Institute, USA
IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2025)
Paper Code

📘 Overview

The Frenet Corridor Planner (FCP) is an optimization-based local path planner designed for real-time trajectory generation in autonomous vehicles. Leveraging the Frenet reference frame and a space-domain bicycle model, FCP defines safe, smooth, drivable corridors around static and dynamic obstacles—then optimizes paths for smoothness, clearance, and risk reduction, before integrating with a speed planner.

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Noise-resilient planning

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Dynamic and efficient updates

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Smooth update with occlusions

🧩 Key Features

  • Frenet-based obstacle modeling
    Vehicles are represented as safety-augmented bounding boxes and pedestrians as convex hulls in Frenet space.
  • Adaptive drivable corridors
    Dynamically selects lateral deviations to create safe passage zones around detected obstacles.
  • Optimization with bicycle kinematics
    A modified space-domain bicycle model ensures kinematic feasibility, smoothness, and safety during optimization.
  • Decoupled path-speed planning
    Separates path and speed stages for efficient computation: FCP handles geometry, while an existing speed planner completes trajectory generation.

📊 Evaluation

Tested in simulation and on physical hardware with realistic sensor noise and dynamic obstacle scenarios. Demonstrated smooth, safe maneuvers around static and moving objects with kinematic consistency, even in tight spaces.

📚 Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite:


@article{tariq2025frenet,
  title   = {Frenet Corridor Planner: An Optimal Local Path Planning Framework for Autonomous Driving},
  author  = {Tariq, Faizan M. and Yeh, Zheng-Hang and Singh, Avinash and Isele, David and Bae, Sangjae},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03695},
  year    = {2025}
}