Control laws to avoid collision with three dimensional obstacles using sensors

Abstract

Collision avoidance in 3D environments is important to the problem of planning safe trajectories for an autonomous vehicle. Existing literature on collision avoidance assumed that obstacle shapes are known a priori and modeled obstacles as spheres or bounding boxes. However, in 3D environments, an obstacle shape is unknown to the autonomous vehicle, and the vehicle detects an obstacle boundary using 3D sensors, such as 3D sonar. In this paper, we introduce control laws for collision avoidance, considering scenarios where a vehicle detects arbitrarily shaped and non-convex obstacles using sensors. Moreover, our control laws are designed considering motion constraints, such as the maximum turn rate and the maximum speed rate of the vehicle. The effectiveness of our control laws is verified using MATLAB simulations.