Smooth Kinematic Controller vs. Pure-Pursuit for Non-holonomic Vehicles

The paper introduces a method for generating trajectories with curve sharpness and curvature constraints. Trajectories are based on continuous-curvature paths using Single & Double Continuous-Curvature paths. The paper also proposes a multi-rate control scheme by considering different dynamics with different sampling frequencies: global path planner at low frequency; target update based on Look-Ahead distance and path computation at medium frequency; curvature control at high frequency. An exhaustive analysis to evaluate the performance of the new method with respect to Pure-Pursuit method has been carried out, showing that the proposed method has better performance in terms of settling time, overshoot and robustness against design parameters. As a conclusion, we can say that our method introduces improvements in comfort and safety because the sharpness, normal jerk and mean abruptness are lower than with the Pure-Pursuit control.