A new approach to local navigation for autonomous driving vehicles based on the curvature velocity method

This paper presents an approach for a car navigation system to follow a road path consisting on a sequence of lanelets. The motion control is divided into high-level planning that produces the road path and lower-level reactive control that safely follows the path. The approach presented here is the lower-level reactive control that combines the simple pure pursuit method to obtain a reference curvature with the beam curvature method (BCM) that keeps the car in the center of the free space in the lane avoiding obstacles that can partially block the lane. The whole system has been applied to an autonomous vehicle aimed for elderly or disable people.