Real-time motion planning for agile autonomous vehicles

Planning the path of an autonomous, agile vehicle in a dynamic environment is a very complex problem, especially when the vehicle is required to use its full maneuvering capabilities. Recent efforts aimed at using randomized algorithms for planning the path of kinematic and dynamic vehicles have demonstrated considerable potential for implementation on future autonomous platforms. This paper builds upon these efforts by proposing a randomized motion planning architecture for dynamical systems in the presence of fixed and moving obstacles. This architecture addresses the dynamic constraints on the vehicle's motion, and it provides at the same time a consistent decoupling between low-level control and motion planning. Simulation examples involving a ground robot and a small autonomous helicopter, are presented and discussed.