Vehicle Motion Planning Using Stream Functions

Abstract

Borrowing a concept from hydrodynamic analysis, this paper presents stream functions which satisfy Laplace's equation as a local-minima free method for producing potential-field based navigation functions in two dimensions. These functions generate smoother paths (i.e. more suited to aircraft-like vehicles) than previous methods. A method is developed for constructing analytic stream functions to produce arbitrary vehicle behaviors while avoiding obstacles, and an exact solution for the case of a single uniformly moving obstacle is presented. The effects of introducing multiple obstacles are discussed and current work in this direction is detailed. Experimental results generated on the Cornell RoboFlag testbed are presented and discussed, as well as related work applying these methods to path planning for unmanned air vehicles.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 06, 2003
Accession Number
ADA464756

Entities

People

  • Stephen Waydo

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Aircrafts
  • Autonomous Navigation
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Equations
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Guidance
  • Motion Planning
  • Navigation
  • Navigational Equipment
  • Robots
  • Simulations
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Two Dimensional
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Approximation Theory.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Plasma Physics / Magnetohydrodynamics

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy