ROUTE PLANNING FOR AUTONOMOUS UNMANNED GROUND VEHICLE OPERATIONS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

Route planning plays an integral role in mission planning for ground vehicle operations in urban areas. Determining the optimum path through an urban area is a well understood problem for traditional ground vehicles; however, in the case of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), additional factors must be considered. For a UGV, perception, rather than mobility, will be the limiting factor in determining operational areas. Current ground vehicle route planning techniques do not take perception concerns into account, and these techniques are not suited for route planning for UGVs. For this study, perception was incorporated into the route planning process by including expected sensor accuracy for GPS, LIDAR, and inertial sensors into the path planning algorithm. The path planner also accounts for additional factors related to UGV performance capabilities that affect autonomous navigation.