An RRT-based navigation approach for mobile robots and automated vehicles

Advances in autonomous navigation, safety, and natural-landmark based localization, are among the key objectives in the development of the next generation of autonomous vehicles, to be deployed in manufacturing and semi-structured environments. In this paper, autonomous navigation and collision detection will be focused, where it is proposed a novel navigation approach that incorporates a RRT-based dynamic path planning and a path-following controller. Safety issues are taken into account in the form of a laser-based object detection and tracking. Experimental results obtained in a virtual environment provide evidence that our proposed navigation method is promising for real-world applications.