An integrity-based path planning strategy for autonomous ground vehicle (AGV)
navigation in urban environments is developed. The vehicle is assumed to
navigate by utilizing cellular long-term evolution (LTE) signals in addition to
Global Positioning System (GPS) signals. Given a desired destination, an
optimal path is calculated, which minimizes a cost function that considers both
the horizontal protection level (HPL) and travel distance. The constraints are
that (i) the ratio of nodes with faulty signals to the total nodes be lower
than a maximum allowable ratio and (ii) the HPLs along each candidate path be
lower than the horizontal alert limit (HAL). To predict the faults and HPL
before the vehicle is driven, GPS and LTE pseudoranges along the candidate
paths are generated utilizing a commercial ray-tracing software and
three-dimensional (3D) terrain and building maps. Simulated pseudoranges inform
the path planning algorithm about potential biases due to reflections from
buildings in urban environments. Simulation results are presented showing that
the optimal path produced by the proposed path planning strategy has the
minimum average HPL among the candidate paths.Comment: Submitted to ION GNSS+ 202
