Development of the control system for the Vislab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge

This paper presents the control system of an autonomous vehicle capable of perceiving and describing the environment using different inputs, such as GPS waypoints, roadways borders and lines, leader vehicles, and obstacles to be avoided. The controller has been implemented and tested for the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a long intercontinental trip that aims to demonstrate capabilities of modern autonomous vehicles. To fulfill this mission a general-purpose real-time motion planning system was designed and implemented. This pathplanner, based on the estimation of feasible trajectories on a cost map, is described and analyzed. System performance has been evaluated during tests: experimental results have demonstrated the capability of the system in vehicle following.