A path planning achievement of car following in motion control via LiDAR sensing

This paper presents a new car following system to track a preceding car and maintain a desired safe distance based on a laser imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR) sensor. The proposed system has the ability of lane change, including longitudinal and lateral control. To accomplish the car following sensing task, environment information provided by in-vehicle Lidar and monocular vision is used. A camera is an auxiliary device to map Lidar data into the output image and verify the detection ability of LiDAR. The LiDAR and camera sensors are installed on a demonstrated vehicle, and the LiDAR sensor which has one-dimensional scanning ability can measure the relative distance of the vehicle from a preceding vehicle by scanning the horizontal plane with laser beams. The relative position is processed and estimated by random sample consensus (RANSAC) method and geometry relation, and then the heading and speed of vehicle are automatically operated by an embedded processor. The speed variation tracking is implemented by fuzzy-PI algorithm, and the pure pursuit method is applied as the steering control strategy to keep up with the trajectory in lateral control. Environmental clutter becomes the main challenge in data processing when LiDAR tries to track the desired vehicle. Besides, a comfortable requirement of vehicle control is also considered and complied with the rule of ISO 2631. Thus, the proposed system integrates engine vacuum connected to throttle and active steering system with embedded ahead control algorithms into a powerful car following system in practice, which has been verified in experiments using two vehicles. The mobile hardware are built with three embedded systems using X86 processor in Linux system, and furthermore the sensing data collection is accomplished by Ethernet interface. The proposed system is carried out with theoretical application and hardware integration, and the result shows car following approach applicability.