A considering lane information and obstacle-avoidance motion planning approach

We present an improved RRT* to blend lane information and avoid obstacles in this paper. Unlike most of other improved RRT*, this paper attach great importance to the convergent goal of RRT*. We consider the condition that there exists a reference path, maybe not the shortest path, but the environment requires the vehicle to follow, such as a lane center. Compared with standard RRT* applied to differential situation, we first add a TesttoGoal procedure to improve the convergent speed and also make sure the path can reach the goal pose but not the goal region to promise the safety of autonomous vehicle. One of the key characteristic of our improved algorithm is to employ a fast clothoid fitting method into RRT* to enable us to control the curvature. Another important modification is the heuristic sampling method that makes our algorithm can converge to lane center. We evaluate our algorithm with a real lane to demonstrate the effect of our modifications.