Pseudospectral motion planning techniques for autonomous obstacle avoidance

Abstract

We consider the problem of generating minimumtime trajectories for autonomous vehicles. Shapes of arbitrary number, size and configuration are modeled in the form of path constraints in the resulting constrained nonlinear optimal control problem. Pseudospectral techniques are used to solve the problem. Solutions are obtained within a few seconds even under a MATLAB environment running on legacy computer hardware. The method is tested under various obstacle environments, and the optimality of the computed trajectories is verified by way of the necessary conditions.