Energy Efficient Path Planning for Low Speed Autonomous Electric Vehicle

This work presents an energy efficient approach for autonomous electric vehicle path planning. When the vehicle is moving at low speed, the rolling resistance losses can be more than the aerodynamic losses, on a flat ground. In particular, for warehouse low-speed electric vehicles, different road-tire frictions may lead to varying rolling resistance which impacts the energy consumption.The minimization of the energy consumed by a vehicle is important in the context where the number of charging stations is limited. The proposed method aims at planning the most energy efficient path by taking into account the rolling resistance and the path length. Unlike most studies reported in the literature, this energy efficient path planner can achieve a good trade-off between preserving battery energy and not extending to much the path length. The preliminary results obtained through extensive simulation indicates that the optimized path planner is effective and robust.