Short-range guidance of autonomous vehicles—a comparative study

Abstract

In this paper, two generic line-of-sight (LOS) sensing-based short-range guidance methodologies are presented for the docking of autonomous vehicles. The first method utilizes a passive LOS sensing scheme to provide vehicle corrective motions, while the latter method utilizes active sensing. The novelty of the proposed guidance methodologies is their applicability to situations that do not allow for direct proximity measurements of the vehicle. In such instances, one must employ a guidance-based technique to move the vehicle to its desired pose using corrective actions at the final stages of its motion. The objective of both proposed guidance methods is, thus, to successfully minimize the systematic errors of the vehicle, while allowing it to converge to its desired pose within random noise limits. Both techniques were successfully tested via simulations and are discussed herein in terms of convergence rate and accuracy, in addition to the types of localization problems that each method should be used in.