Path and speed planning for smooth autonomous navigation

International audienceThis paper presents a path and speed planner for automated vehicles in unstructured environments. A global path planner has been designed with bounded continuous curvature and bounded curvature derivative to ensure smooth driving. This will allow the vehicle to know a priori which is the shortest path within a selected area that guarantees lateral accelerations and steering wheel speeds below given pre-set thresholds. A closed-form speed profiler uses semantic information provided by the path planner to set a continuous velocity reference that takes into account bounds on lateral and longitudinal accelerations consistent with comfort. The suitability of the above two features was compared to manual driving in a real instrumented vehicle on a test track