Path Planning in Unstructured Environments : A Real-time Hybrid A' Implementation for Fast and Deterministic Path Generation for the KTH Research Concept Vehicle

Abstract: On the way to fully autonomously driving vehicles a multitude of challenges have to be overcome. One common problem is the navigation of the vehicle from a start pose to a goal pose in an environment that does not provide any specic structure (no preferred ways of movement). Typical examples of such environments are parking lots or construction sites; in these scenarios the vehicle needs to navigate safely around obstacles ideally using the optimal (with regard to a specied parameter) path between the start and the goal pose. The work conducted throughout this master's thesis focuses on the development of a suitable path planning algorithm for the Research Concept Vehicle (RCV) of the Integrated Transport Research Lab (ITRL) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, Sweden. The development of the path planner requires more than just the pure algorithm, as the code needs to be tested and respective results evaluated. In addition, the resulting algorithm needs to be wrapped in a way that it can be deployed easily and interfaced with di erent other systems on the research vehicle. Thus the thesis also tries to gives insights into ways of achieving realtime capabilities necessary for experimental testing as well as on how to setup a visualization environment for simulation and debugging.