LAUSR

Summary An effective path planner is critical for autonomous traversal of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in harsh environments. This paper describes a novel path planning method considering Bézier curves and a two-layer planning framework. In the two-layer framework, a road centerline (RCL) estimator located on the upper layer works as a global planner to obtain the local target for the bottom local planner. The RCL is estimated from a series of candidate Bézier curves based on a safety criterion. In the bottom layer, an optimal trajectory planner and a speed planner make up the local planner to obtain the desired steering turning angle and linear speed. The criteria for optimal trajectory selection are designed for comfortable driving. Road safety is considered in the speed planner for robust driving. Three sets of simulations are used to evaluate and quantify the relative performance of variations of our path planning algorithm. The proposed path planning method is implemented on a modified Polaris RZR 800 UGV, too. Two experiments based on this UGV are set up in the country road environment to demonstrate the viability of the proposed method.