Experimental investigation of online path planning for electric vehicles

Abstract

This paper describes a real-time capable online path planning on roads and its experimental investigation for the highly maneuverable robotic electric vehicle research platform ROboMObil. The path planning algorithm is based on an efficiently solvable and compact optimization problem and contributes to the autonomous driving of centralized controlled vehicles. The necessary development from a global offline problem formulation towards an online receding horizon method is shown, which is capable of taking environmental changes into account. The online planned path together with a generated velocity profile serves as an input to the ROboMObil's geometric path following control, allowing for automated driving. Finally, a test drive shows the results of implementing the presented algorithms on this research vehicle and investigates the energy saving capabilities of the proposed path planning methodology.