Obstacle avoidance and trajectory replanification for a group of communicating vehicles

Various ¿Urban Transportation Systems¿ are currently in developing, in order to put forward solutions to congestion and pollution in dense areas. Autonomous electric vehicles in free-access can be seen as an attractive approach, in view of the large flexibility that can be expected. One instrumental functionality linked to this solution is platoon motion: several autonomous vehicles accurately follow a trajectory defined on a dedicated circulation lane, with pre-specified inter-distances. A global decentralized platoon control strategy, supported by inter-vehicle communications and relying on nonlinear control techniques is here proposed. In the nominal case, each vehicle is controlled with respect to the same smooth reference trajectory modelled by cubic B-Splines. This trajectory is locally modified and relayed on-line when a vehicle detects an obstacle. The trajectory distortion naturally reflects a driver's behaviour, since it consists in approximated clothoidal trajectories and the use of B-Splines ensures consistent connections. Experimental results, carried out with several urban vehicles, demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach.

[1]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  Accurate automatic guidance of an urban electric vehicle relying on a kinematic GPS sensor , 2004 .

[2]  D. Walton,et al.  An arc spline approximation to a clothoid , 2004 .

[3]  D. Swaroop,et al.  The Design of a Controller for a Following Vehicle in an Emergency Lane Change Maneuver , 1999 .

[4]  John Valasek,et al.  Preliminary results of one-dimensional vehicle formation control using a structural analogy , 2003, Proceedings of the 2003 American Control Conference, 2003..

[5]  John F. Canny,et al.  Planning smooth paths for mobile robots , 1989, Proceedings, 1989 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Patrick Rives,et al.  Vision-based Control for Car Platooning using Homography Decomposition , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  N. Montés,et al.  Trajectory Generation based on Rational Bezier Curves as Clothoids , 2007, 2007 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium.

[8]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  Nonlinear Control for Urban Vehicles Platooning, Relying upon a Unique Kinematic GPS , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Frank L. Lewis,et al.  Autonomous Mobile Robots : Sensing, Control, Decision Making and Applications , 2006 .

[10]  Yi Guo,et al.  Formation Control of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Using Graph Theoretical Methods , 2007 .

[11]  Thierry Fraichard,et al.  Collision-free and continuous-curvature path planning for car-like robots , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  A motion planner for nonholonomic mobile robots , 1994, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[13]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  On-line reference trajectory generation for manually convoying a platoon of automatic urban vehicles , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  Thierry Fraichard,et al.  From Reeds and Shepp's to continuous-curvature paths , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[15]  Kenjiro T. Miura,et al.  An approximation approach of the clothoid curve defined in the interval [0, /2] and its offset by free-form curves , 2001, Comput. Aided Des..

[16]  Christophe Debain,et al.  A real-time, multi-sensor architecture for fusion of delayed observations: application to vehicle localization , 2006, 2006 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference.

[17]  Domenico Prattichizzo,et al.  Discussion of paper by , 2003 .

[18]  Soo-Yeong Yi,et al.  Impedance control for a vehicle platoon system , 2005 .

[19]  Michel Dhome,et al.  Towards an alternative GPS sensor in dense urban environment from visual memory , 2004, BMVC.

[20]  C. Samson.  Control of chained systems application to path following and time-varying point-stabilization of mobile robots , 1995, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[21]  J. M. Chacón,et al.  Polynomial approximation to clothoids via s-power series , 2003, Comput. Aided Des..