Target-tracking and path planning for vehicle following in jungle environment

In this paper, we proposed a robot vehicle following algorithm which can navigate a 10 ton armored personnel carrier to follow a leading vehicle (MPV) in the jungle. This algorithm comprises two components, the first one is a target tracking module which can detect and track the lead vehicle from the measurements of a SICK laser scanner; the second one is a obstacle avoidance module which takes the tracking results and the local environment description as input, it then generates the set-points for the vehicle to follow. Plenty of trials have been carried out in the jungle of Singapore, our technique´s validity and robust is demonstrated and tested, the results will be showed in this paper.