US Patent 11754408 Methods and systems for topological planning in autonomous driving

Systems and methods of maneuvering an autonomous vehicle in a local region using topological planning, while traversing a route to a destination location, are disclosed. The system includes an autonomous vehicle including one or more sensors and a processor. The processor is configured to determine the local region on the route and receive real-time information corresponding to the local region. The processor performs topological planning to identify on or more topologically distinct classes of trajectories, compute a constraint set for each of the one or more topologically distinct classes of trajectories, optimize a trajectory to generate a candidate trajectory for each constraint set, and select a trajectory for the autonomous vehicle to traverse the local region from amongst the one or more candidate trajectories. Each of the one or more topologically distinct classes is associated with a plurality of trajectories that take the same combination of discrete actions with respect to objects in the local region.