Experimental Tests of Autonomous Ground Vehicles with Preview

This paper describes the design and experimental tests of a path planning and reference tracking algorithm for autonomous ground vehicles. The ground vehicles under consideration are equipped with forward looking sensors that provide a preview capability over a certain horizon. A two-level control framework is proposed for real-time implementation of the model predictive control (MPC) algorithm, where the high-level performs on-line optimization to generate the best possible local reference respect to various constraints and the low-level commands the vehicle to follow realistic trajectories generated by the high-level controller. The proposed control scheme is implemented on an indoor testbed through networks with satisfactory performance.