Tractor-Trailer Vehicle Trajectory Planning in Narrow Environments with a Progressively Constrained Optimal Control Approach


Li B., ACARMAN T., Zhang Y., Zhang L., Yaman C., Kong Q.

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, cilt.5, sa.3, ss.414-425, 2020 (Scopus) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 5 Sayı: 3
  • Basım Tarihi: 2020
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1109/tiv.2019.2960943
  • Dergi Adı: IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.414-425
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: collision avoidance, numerical optimal control, Tractor-trailer vehicle, trajectory planning
  • Galatasaray Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Trajectory planning for a tractor-trailer vehicle is challenging due to the non-convex collision avoidance constraints and the unstable kinematics. This article aims to plan precise and optimal trajectory for a car-like tractor that tows standard or general N-trailers in an environment with static obstacles. This trajectory planning scheme can be formulated as a unified optimal control problem, but numerically solving that problem is difficult. Two efforts are made to address the difficulty. First, an extended hybrid A∗ search algorithm is proposed to provide an initial guess for the numerical optimization. Second, the numerical optimization process is eased through adopting a progressively constrained optimization strategy, which is about sequentially handling the kinematics, collision avoidance constraints, and boundary conditions. Particularly in dealing with the collision avoidance constraints, an adaptively homotopic warm-starting algorithm is proposed, which defines a sequence of subproblems with the obstacle areas adaptively increase towards their nominal scales. Through solving these subproblems in a sequence, the whole collision avoidance difficulties are dispersed and gradually tackled. Comparative simulations are conducted to validate the efficacy of the proposed trajectory planner.