OBSTACLE-BASED ROUTE PLANNING FOR A STEERING CONSTRAINED AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE

The Team Cybernet vehicle for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge¹ incorporated a route planning approach that uses sensed obstacles in the environment as the basis for potential turn placement prior to performing path search. The path search is confined to finding a set of straight-line tangents that connect circles of maximum curvature that are constructed adjacent to sensed obstacles. This approach is substantially different from traditional approaches in that the complexity of the search space is not based on the length of the path, but rather on the number of obstacles in the field. For sparse obstacle fields, this approach allows for very fast plan generation and results in paths that are guaranteed by construction to not violate steering constraints.