QuayPoints: A Reasoning Framework to Bridge the Information Gap Between Global and Local Planning in Autonomous Racing

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Hauptverfasser: Dighe, Yashom, Kim, Youngjin, Dantu, Karthik
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Dighe, Yashom
Kim, Youngjin
Dantu, Karthik
author_facet Dighe, Yashom
Kim, Youngjin
Dantu, Karthik
contents Autonomous racing requires tight integration between perception, planning and control to minimize latency as well as timely decision making. A standard autonomy pipeline comprising a global planner, local planner, and controller loses information as the higher-level racing context is sequentially propagated downstream into specific task-oriented context. In particular, the global planner's understanding of optimality is typically reduced to a sparse set of waypoints, leaving the local planner to make reactive decisions with limited context. This paper investigates whether additional global insights, specifically time-optimality information, can be meaningfully passed to the local planner to improve downstream decisions. We introduce a framework that preserves essential global knowledge and conveys it to the local planner through QuayPoints regions where deviations from the optimal raceline result in significant compromises to optimality. QuayPoints enable local planners to make more informed global decisions when deviating from the raceline, such as during strategic overtaking. To demonstrate this, we integrate QuayPoints into an existing planner and show that it consistently overtakes opponents traveling at up to 75% of the ego vehicle's speed across four distinct race tracks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10886
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QuayPoints: A Reasoning Framework to Bridge the Information Gap Between Global and Local Planning in Autonomous Racing
Dighe, Yashom
Kim, Youngjin
Dantu, Karthik
Robotics
Autonomous racing requires tight integration between perception, planning and control to minimize latency as well as timely decision making. A standard autonomy pipeline comprising a global planner, local planner, and controller loses information as the higher-level racing context is sequentially propagated downstream into specific task-oriented context. In particular, the global planner's understanding of optimality is typically reduced to a sparse set of waypoints, leaving the local planner to make reactive decisions with limited context. This paper investigates whether additional global insights, specifically time-optimality information, can be meaningfully passed to the local planner to improve downstream decisions. We introduce a framework that preserves essential global knowledge and conveys it to the local planner through QuayPoints regions where deviations from the optimal raceline result in significant compromises to optimality. QuayPoints enable local planners to make more informed global decisions when deviating from the raceline, such as during strategic overtaking. To demonstrate this, we integrate QuayPoints into an existing planner and show that it consistently overtakes opponents traveling at up to 75% of the ego vehicle's speed across four distinct race tracks.
title QuayPoints: A Reasoning Framework to Bridge the Information Gap Between Global and Local Planning in Autonomous Racing
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10886