Autonomous Vehicle Navigation in Semi-Structured Urban Environment

Recent advances in mobile robotic research have contributed to the development of autonomous driving systems for intelligent robotic vehicles. The motion planner is the component of the intelligent system responsible for planning a path that leads the vehicle from its current state to the desired goal state avoiding obstacles in the environment. This paper describes the use of a motion planning method based on lattice state space and anytime dynamic A* applied to our autonomous vehicle for navigation in a semi-structured urban environment. We created a 3D simulation model of our vehicle, implemented the motion planner approach described here and conducted experiments in both simulated and real parking lots.