An Online Path Planning Algorithm for Automated Vehicles for Slow Speed Maneuvering

Today the level of automation of road vehicles increases due to the new requirements of the society. In the last century the main motivation was to make driving easier or more comfortable, nowadays lower fuel consumption, higher traffic safety and reduced environmental impact are in the focus of the developments. The improvement of automation will result a safer and environmental friendlier road transport.In automated vehicles a software does the driving tasks. It is a complex, multiple level controlling task which has several steps. An important step is, when the vehicle plans its own trajectory. The trajectories can also be meant aspects: it can mean the exact path and speed profile of the vehicle or it can mean the nodes on a traffic network where the vehicle should go.This paper presents the development of path planning algorithms. Based on the earlier offline path planning research this paper will present a basic online path planning algorithm. To reach the aim a map will be given as a 2204 × 1294 size matrix where the roads, the obstacles and the parking areas will be defined by different numbers. The map presents a smaller area of the campus of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The development, the testing and validation will be done in Prescan simulation environment. The aim is to make an algorithm which can modify the pre-planned path of the vehicle to avoid the collision with the LIDAR-sensed obstacles. The vehicle speed will be assumed slow enough to ignore the dynamical properties of the vehicle.