Navigation Integrated End-to-end Path Planning Development and Vehicle Testing
2026-01-0032
To be published on 04/07/2026
- Content
- In order to achieve fully autonomous driving, point to point autonomous navigation is the most important task. Most existing end-to-end models output a short-horizon path which makes the decision process hard to interpret and unreliable at intersections and complex driving scenarios. In this research, we build a navigation-integrated end-to-end path planner on top of an openpilot open source model. We created a navigation branch that encodes route polyline geometry, distance-to-next-maneuver, and high-level instructions and combines with path plan branch using residual blocks and feed-forward layers. By adding minimal parameters, new model keeps the original openpilot tasks unchanged and have the path output based on the navigation information. The model is trained on diverse urban scenes and lighting conditions, and it shows improved route adherence in vehicle testing. The proposed model is validated in a comma 3x device installed on a 2025 Nissan Leaf test vehicle. The road test results show the proposed algorithm shows less path planning error than the stock openpilot end to end model when evaluated against the human driver. This proposed path planning model can be adapted to different type of vehicles for the point to point navigation task.. Keywords— map-guided end-to-end planning; path planning; navigation; ADAS.
- Citation
- Wang, Hanchen et al., "Navigation Integrated End-to-end Path Planning Development and Vehicle Testing," SAE Technical Paper 2026-01-0032, 2026-, .