Local Path Planning for Autonomous Land Vehicle Based on Navigation Function

To address the local path planning problem for autonomous land vehicle in unstructured environments, a novel method combining navigation function and A* search is proposed. The computed navigation function in this paper embodies different constraints of vehicle, so in fact to be a near-feasible trajectory. Next the navigation function and sensed obstacles is used to construct the heuristic function, which is useful for the A* search of a local path from the initial state to the goal state in real time. Experiment results show that the proposed method can well solve the problem of local path planning for autonomous land vehicle in unstructured environments.