Autonomous navigation framework for a car-like robot

Abstract

This technical report describes the work done to develop a new navigation scheme for an autonomous car-like robot available at the Mobile Robotics Laboratory at IRI. To plan the general path the robot should follow (i.e. the global planner), a search based planner algorithm, with motion primitives which take into account the kinematic constraints of the robot, is used. To actually execute the path and avoid dynamic obstacles (i.e the local planner) a modification of the DWA algorithm is used, which takes into account the kinematic constraints of the ackermann configuration to generate and evaluate possible trajectories for the robot. The whole navigation scheme has been integrated into the ROS middleware navigation framework and tested on the real robot and also in a simulator.