Unified path planner for parking an autonomous vehicle based on RRT

Maneuvering autonomous vehicles in constrained environments, such as autonomous vehicle parking, is not a trivial task and has received increasing attention from both the academy and industry. However, the traditional methods divide the problem into parallel parking, perpendicular parking, and echelon parking, then different methods are applied for the parking motion planning. In this paper a Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) based path planner is implemented for autonomous vehicle parking problem, which treats all the situations in a unified manner. As the RRT method sometimes generates some complicated paths, a smoother is also implemented for smoothing generated paths. The proposed algorithm is verified in simulation and generates applicable solutions for the proposed application scenarios.