  Maneuvering an articulated vehicle on narrow road stretches is often a
challenging task for a human driver. Unless the vehicle is accurately steered,
parts of the vehicle's bodies may exceed its assigned drive lane, resulting in
an increased risk of collision with surrounding traffic. In this work, an
optimization-based path-planning algorithm is proposed targeting on-road
driving scenarios for articulated vehicles composed of a tractor and a trailer.
To this end, we model the tractor-trailer vehicle in a road-aligned coordinate
frame suited for on-road planning. Based on driving heuristics, a set of
different optimization objectives is proposed, with the overall goal of
designing a path planner that computes paths which minimize the off-track of
the vehicle bodies swept area, while remaining on the road and avoiding
collision with obstacles. The proposed optimization-based path-planning
algorithm, together with the different optimization objectives, is evaluated
and analyzed in simulations on a set of complicated and practically relevant
on-road planning scenarios using the most challenging tractor-trailer
dimensions.
