Sensor-based control architecture for a car-like vehicle

Christian Laugier (1) , Thierry Fraichard (1) , Philippe Garnier (2) , Igor Paromtchik (2) , Alexis Scheuer (2)

1 E-MOTION - Geometry and Probability for Motion and Action
2 SHARP - Automatic Programming and Decisional Systems in Robotics

This paper presents a control architecture endowing a car-like vehicle moving in a dynamic and partially known environment with autonomous motion capabilities. Like most recent control architectures for autonomous robot systems, it combines three functional components: a set of basic real-time skills, a reactive execution mechanism and a decision module. The main novelty of the architecture proposed lies in the introduction of a fourth component akin to a meta-level of skills: the sensor-based manoeuvres, ie general templates that encode high-level expert human knowledge and heuristics about how a specific motion task is to be performed. The concept of sensor-based manoeuvres permit to reduce the planning effort required to address a given motion task, thus improving the overall response-time of the system, while retaining the good properties of a skill-based architecture, ie robustness, flexibility and reactivity. The paper focuses on the trajectory planning function (which is an important part of the decision module) and two types of sensor-based manoeuvres, trajectory following and parallel parking, that have been implemented and successfully tested on a real automatic car-like vehicle placed in different situations.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Christian Laugier, Thierry Fraichard, Philippe Garnier, Igor Paromtchik, Alexis Scheuer. Sensor-based control architecture for a car-like vehicle. Autonomous Robots, 1999, 6 (2). ⟨inria-00259323⟩