Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicle in Off-Road Scenario

The road topography information, such as bank angle and road slope, can significantly affect the trajectory tracking performance of the autonomous vehicle, so this information needs to be considered in the trajectory planning and tracking control for off-road autonomous vehicle. In this chapter, a two-level real-time dynamically integrated spatiotemporal-based trajectory planning and control method for off-road autonomous vehicle is proposed. In the upper-level trajectory planner, the most suitable time-parameterised trajectory with the minimum values of road slope and bank angle can be selected from a set of candidate trajectories. In the lower-level trajectory tracking controller, the sliding-mode control (SMC) technique is applied to control the vehicle and achieve the desired trajectory. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the proposed integrated trajectory planning and control method and prove that the proposed integrated method has better overall tracking control and dynamics control performance than the conventional method both in the highway scenario and off-road scenario. Furthermore, the four-wheel-independent-steering (4WIS) and four-wheel-independent-driving (4WID) vehicle shows better tracking control performance than vehicle based on two-wheel model