Optimal path planning for car-like vehicles in the presence of obstacles

Global optimal path planning of car-like vehicles remains today an open problem especially in the presence of obstacles. In this paper, we propose a method to obtain the optimal motion of a vehicle considering kinematic and obstacle constraints. We employ an efficient algorithm (CACM), based on cell mapping techniques, to find the optimal motion laws of a car-like vehicle. Simulation results are reported to show the satisfactory performance of the method.