Abstract
In this paper, the problem of vehicle guidance by means of an external leader is described. The objective is to navigate a four-wheeled vehicle through unstructured environments, characterized by the lack of availability of typical guidance infrastructure like lane markings or HD maps. The trajectory-following approach is based on an estimate of the leader’s path. For that, position measurements are stored over time with respect to an inertial frame. A new strategy is proposed to rate the significance of position measurements and ensure that a certain threshold of stored samples is not exceeded. Having an estimate of the leader path is essential to prevent the cutting-corner phenomenon and for exact path following in general. A spline-approximation technique is applied to obtain a smooth reference path for the underlying lateral and longitudinal motion controllers. For longitudinal tracking, a constant time-headway policy was implemented, to follow the leader with a constant time gap along the estimated path. The algorithm was first developed and tested in a simulation framework and then deployed in a demonstrator vehicle for validation under real operating conditions. The presented experimental results were achieved using only on-board sensors of the demonstrator vehicle, while high-accuracy differential GPS-based position measurements serve as the ground truth data for visualization
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 1866 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Electronics |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 13 Jun 2022 |
Keywords
- path following
- path tracking
- spline approximation
- splines
- vehicle following
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Signal Processing
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Hardware and Architecture
- Computer Networks and Communications