Navigation Among Moving Obstacles Using the NLVO: Principles and Applications to Intelligent Vehicles

Abstract

Vehicle navigation in dynamic environments is a challenging task, especially when the motion of the obstacles populating the environment is unknown beforehand and is updated at runtime. Traditional motion planning approaches are too slow to be applied in real-time to this problem, whereas reactive navigation methods have generally a too short look-ahead horizon. Recently, iterative planning has emerged as a promising approach, however, it does not explicitly take into account the movements of the obstacles.This paper presents a real-time motion planning approach, based on the concept of the Non-Linear V-Obstacle (NLVO) (Shiller et al., 2001). Given a predicted environment, the NLVO models the set of velocities which lead to collisions with static and moving obstacles, and an estimation of the times-to-collision. At each controller iteration, an iterative A* motion planner evaluates the potential moves of the robot, based on the computed NLVO and the traveling time. Previous search results are reused to both minimize computation and maintain the global coherence of the solutions.We first review the concept of the NLVO, and then present the iterative planner. The planner is then applied to vehicle navigation and demonstrated in a complex traffic scenario.

Testing Autonomous Robot Control Software Using Procedural Content Generation

“…One interesting case would be to apply it to the initial formulation of Velocity Obstacles, as presented by Fiorini and Shiller [20], and check whether it reveals the known flaws in that algorithm (see [21], [22]). …”

Velocity Occupancy Space for Unmanned Ground Vehicles With Actuation Error

“…This method computes a velocity obstacle, which consists of all vehicle velocities that will lead to a collision with an obstacle, based on the obstacle's velocity and distance from the vehicle. In later papers, Large et al adapt the velocity obstacle concept in order to deal with non-linear velocity obstacles (obstacles which change direction or speed) [6] and to account for long obstacles (such as hallway walls) [7].…”

“…The concept of a velocity obstacle, as detailed by [4,5,7,13], was used in the development of VOS. Both traditional velocity obstacles and VOS require a vehicle to be able to instantaneously change velocities in order for the velocity obstacles to remain valid.…”

Autonomous mobile robot navigation based on an integrated environment representation designed in dynamic environments

“…However, the problem of avoiding collisions in dynamic environment is much harder. Several works have been developed for dynamic environments like velocity obstacles (Fiorini and Shiller, 1998;Large et al, 2005), collision cones (Chakravarthy and Ghose, 1998), the rolling window method (Zhang and Xi, 2003), inevitable collision state (Fraichard and Asama, 2004), the prediction model for beam curvature method (Shi et al, 2010), and other methods (Jaradata et al, 2011;Yaonana and Yimin, 2011;Zhu and Hua, 2011;Zhong et al, 2014;Bis et al, 2012). This paper is organised as follows.…”