Fast collision checking for intelligent vehicle motion planning

We present a method for fast collision checking that is suitable for application in motion planning for intelligent vehicles. One of the difficulties that arises in this domain is the fact that typical, car-like autonomous vehicles cannot easily be approximated by a rotationally invariant disk shape. Instead, the orientation of the vehicle must be accounted for explicitly. Our proposal is to decompose the vehicle shape into several disk shaped primitives, so that the task of collision checking can be broken down into few very simple collision tests. We also propose a highly optimised method to perform these primitive collision tests that requires a minimum of arithmetic operations. We show by experiments that our method bears significant performance benefits over conventional methods.