Safe Vehicle Navigation in Dynamic Urban Scenarios

This paper has presented the deliberative part of the navigation architecture for the SmartTer platform, comprising two main component: (a) route planning, which finds a set of configurations between two given points of the environment while taking into account given traffic rules; and (b) partial motion planning, which handles the actual execution of the plan while taking into account the dynamic elements of the world. A key aspect of the navigation architecture proposed is that a special attention is paid to the motion safety issue, ie the ability to avoid collisions. Different safety levels are explored and their operational conditions are explicitly spelled out (something which is usually not done). The results depict safe navigation in dynamic scenarios whichinclude both moving vehicles and pedestrians, where the architecture has been implemented in both real and simulated platforms, although only simulation results are provided at the time of paper writing. On the theoretical side, an interesting research direction is the exploration of more advanced motion prediction techniques in order to improve both the accuracy and the time horizon of our safety checks.