The obstacle avoidance motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles: A low-demanding receding horizon control scheme

The paper addresses the obstacle avoidance motion planning problem for ground vehicles operating in uncertain environments. By resorting to set-theoretic ideas, a receding horizon control algorithm is proposed for robots modelled by linear time-invariant (LTI) systems subject to input and state constraints and disturbance effects. Sequences of inner ellipsoidal approximations of the exact one-step controllable sets are pre-computed for all the possible obstacle scenarios and then on-line exploited to determine the more adequate control action to be applied to the robot in a receding horizon fashion. The resulting framework guarantees Uniformly Ultimate Boundedness and constraints fulfilment regardless of any obstacle scenario occurrence. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.