Experimental Validation of High Speed Hazard Avoidance Control for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

At high speeds in natural terrain, unmanned ground vehicles can experience unexpected situations that require rapid hazard avoidance maneuvers. In these scenarios there is often limited time to replan a path based on high-order dynamic models. This paper presents a novel method for high speed navigation and hazard avoidance based on the two dimensional “trajectory space,” a compact and computationally efficient modelbased representation of a robot’s dynamic performance limits on natural terrain. This paper also presents a novel method for trajectory replanning, based on a “curvature matching” technique. Experimental results on a small high-speed UGV demonstrate the method’s effectiveness. Copyright © 2005 IFAC