Chen Jiajia, Zhao Pan, Liang Huawei, Mei Tao
School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changzhou 213164, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2014 Sep 18;14(9):17548-66. doi: 10.3390/s140917548.
The autonomous vehicle is an automated system equipped with features like environment perception, decision-making, motion planning, and control and execution technology. Navigating in an unstructured and complex environment is a huge challenge for autonomous vehicles, due to the irregular shape of road, the requirement of real-time planning, and the nonholonomic constraints of vehicle. This paper presents a motion planning method, based on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network, to guide the autonomous vehicle in unstructured environments. The proposed algorithm extracts the drivable region from the perception grid map based on the global path, which is available in the road network. The sample points are randomly selected in the drivable region, and a gradient descent method is used to train the RBF network. The parameters of the motion-planning algorithm are verified through the simulation and experiment. It is observed that the proposed approach produces a flexible, smooth, and safe path that can fit any road shape. The method is implemented on autonomous vehicle and verified against many outdoor scenes; furthermore, a comparison of proposed method with the existing well-known Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) method is presented. The experimental results show that the proposed method is highly effective in planning the vehicle path and offers better motion quality.
自动驾驶车辆是一种配备环境感知、决策、运动规划以及控制与执行技术等功能的自动化系统。由于道路形状不规则、实时规划要求以及车辆的非完整约束,在非结构化和复杂环境中导航对自动驾驶车辆来说是一项巨大挑战。本文提出一种基于径向基函数(RBF)神经网络的运动规划方法,以引导自动驾驶车辆在非结构化环境中行驶。该算法基于道路网络中可用的全局路径,从感知网格地图中提取可行驶区域。在可行驶区域内随机选择采样点,并使用梯度下降法训练RBF网络。通过仿真和实验对运动规划算法的参数进行了验证。结果表明,所提出的方法能生成一条灵活、平滑且安全的路径,可适应任何道路形状。该方法在自动驾驶车辆上得以实现,并针对许多户外场景进行了验证;此外,还将所提出的方法与现有的著名快速扩展随机树(RRT)方法进行了比较。实验结果表明,该方法在规划车辆路径方面非常有效,并且能提供更好的运动质量。