Continuous curvature planning with obstacle avoidance capabilities in urban scenarios

This paper presents a continuous curvature planning algorithm with obstacle avoidance capabilities. The automated system generates a collision free path that considers vehicle's constraints, the road and different obstacles inside the horizon of view. The developed planning module was integrated in the RITS (former IMARA) autonomous vehicle architecture. The goal of this module is to obtain an accurate, continuous and safe path generation, by implementing parametric curves. To this end, a continuous curvature profile when calculating vehicle trajectory is introduced. It also permits to generate different speed profiles, improving the comfort by reducing lateral accelerations in the driving process. These algorithms have been implemented in simulated -ProSiVIC- and real platforms -Cybercars- showing good results in both cases. This approach is currently being implemented in the framework of the EU CityMobil2 project.