Quintic G/sup 2/-splines for trajectory planning of autonomous vehicles

Presents a motion planning primitive for car-like vehicles. It is a completely parametrized quintic spline, denoted as /spl eta/-spline, that allows interpolation of an arbitrary sequence of points with overall second order geometric (G/sup 2/-) continuity. Issues such as minimality, regularity, symmetry, and flexibility of these G/sup 2/-splines are addressed in the exposition. The development of the new primitive is tightly connected to the flatness based control of nonholonomic car-like vehicles.