Optimization-based Maneuver Planning for a Tractor-Trailer Vehicle in Complex Environments using Safe Travel Corridors.

A solution for a tractor-trailer vehicle's generic maneuver planning task can be introduced by an optimal control problem (OCP). However, the curse of dimensionality is excited along with the OCP solution due to the collision-avoidance constraints in a large scale. The collision-avoidance conditions are weakened by simply constructing a corridor along a homotopically guiding route such that the vehicle's maneuvers are safely separated from obstacles. This approach is motivated by the safe flight corridor (SFC) applied for path planning of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). But SFC cannot be applied directly to the ground vehicle cases because a tractor-trailer vehicle cannot be modeled as a mass point in a narrow environment. An extension of the SFC is proposed, which requires different bodies of a multi-body vehicle to stay in different safe travel corridors. In this way, a reduced-scale OCP is formulated, and the problem scale becomes irrelevant to the environmental complexity. Simulation results illustrate that near-optimal maneuvers can be derived within less CPU time.