Comparative study of dynamic programming and Pontryagin's minimum principle for autonomous multi-wheeled combat vehicle path planning

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study of two path planning algorithms using optimal control theory for the autonomous multi-wheeled combat vehicle. The developed optimal path planning algorithms use Pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP) and dynamic programming (DP) approaches. PMP and DP are two major branches of the optimal control theory. A simplified two degrees of freedom (DOF) vehicle model is used to derive the differential equations of the vehicle. The cost function associated with the path generation is to be minimised with the vehicle dynamics equations. A comparative study and performance analysis of generated optimal paths using the proposed algorithms was carried out for various scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate that the generated optimal solution using PMP is very close to the DP solution, which is the guaranteed global optimum. In addition, the initial and final condition parameters and the vehicle dynamics are satisfied. However, the PMP computation time is significantly less than the DP.