Path planning and path tracking control of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) will be playing increasingly important role in the future battlefields. How to automatically guide and control UGVs under varying environment conditions represents a challenging issue. This paper presents a novel approach to achieving path planning and path tracking of UGVs under dynamic environments. We apply the topology theory to find the optimal path given any starting and ending points. Algorithms are developed to construct discrete points representing all the possible trajectories, from which an optimal path is identified for the UGV to track. The control scheme used is based on memory based control theory. The optima] path can be dynamically changed according to information gathered from the surrounding environment by the sensor and also the UGV can dynamically track the path using the developed tracking control algorithms. Both theoretic and simulation studies will show the effectiveness of the method.