Design and implementation of proximal planning and control of an unmanned ground vehicle in the dynamic environment

Abstract

<p>This paper presents a novel proximal planning and control (PPC) formulation for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) affected by skidding and slip disturbances. The control approach also considers the presence of moving and static obstacles in the context of operation. The PPC technique is divided into three parts; first, a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) based path-planner is designed to periodically generate an updated feasible trajectory to prevent the vehicle from colliding with other objects from start to the goal pose. In particular, a proximal averaged Newton-type method for optimal control (PANOC) is used to design NMPC. Second, evolutionary programming (EP) based kinematic control (KC) is designed to generate the velocity commands. Third, a dynamic control law is proposed with an extended state observer (ESO) to estimate the effects of bounded but unknown perturbations. Finally, simulations are performed in the presence of linear and nonlinear trajectories of moving obstacles (MO) and static obstacles (SO) to verify the performance of the proposed scheme. Additionally, we have investigated and confirmed that the proposed PPC could run in real-time on a CPU with limited resources. </p>