Predictive control with trajectory planning in the presence of obstacles

In this work, a trajectory planning technique for an autonomous vehicle is proposed. A Predictive Control formulation is used both to plan a trajectory and control the vehicle in the presence of obstacles and dynamic constraints. However, some particularities of this sort of missions may make the time required for solution of the associated optimization problem prohibitive for a given sampling period. In this context, the possibility of using smaller prediction and control horizons is important to obtain a suitable control sequence within each sampling time. For this purpose, a trajectory planner which distributes waypoints along a previously established path is employed in the present paper. Each waypoint is determined so that it can be reached in a horizon which is smaller than the one necessary to reach the target set from the initial position, thus reducing the computational burden during the control phase. Moreover, during the planning phase the waypoints are chosen under the restriction that the target set should be reached within finite time so that the mission can be accomplished.