Realtime Simulation-in-the-Loop Control for Agile Ground Vehicles

In this paper we present a system for real-time control of agile ground vehicles operating in rough 3D terrain replete with bumps, berms, loop-the-loops, skidding, banked-turns and large jumps. The proposed approach fuses local-planning and feedback trajectory-tracking in a unified, simulation-based framework that operates in real-time. Experimentally we find that fast physical simulation-in-the-loop enables impressive control over difficult 3D terrain. The success of the proposed method can be attributed to the fact that it takes advantage of the full expressiveness of the inherently non-linear, terrain-dependent, highly dynamic systems involved. Performance is experimentally validated in a motion capture lab on a high-speed non-holonomic vehicle navigating a 3D map provided by an offline perception system.