Real-Time Capable Path Planning for Energy Management Systems in Future Vehicle Architectures

In this paper an energy optimal path planning and velocity profile generation for our highly maneuverable Robotic Electric Vehicle research platform ROboMObil is presented. The ROMO is a development of the German Aerospace Center’s Robotics and Mechatronics Center to cope with several research topics, like energy efficient, autonomous or remote controlled driving for future (electro-) mobility applications. The main task of the proposed algorithms is to calculate an energy optimal trajectory in a real-time capable way. It is designed to incorporate data from actual traffic situations (e.g. oncoming traffic) or changed conditions (e.g. snowy conditions). The resulting trajectory is then fed forward to a lower level time independent path following control [2] that calculates the motion demands for our energy optimal control allocation. This in turn distributes the demand to the actuators of the over-actuated vehicle. We show a numerical reliable way to formulate the energy optimal path planning optimization objective, which is able to provide a consistent replanning feature considering the actual vehicle states. Besides this, different types of optimization methods are evaluated for their real-time capabilities. The velocity profile will be calculated afterwards and the generation of the profile is also enabled to handle dynamic replanning. Finally, we show several experimental results, using a virtual road definition and tests on a commercial real-time platform