Trajectory Planning and Guidance
Pantelis Isaiah, Tal Y. Shima · Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering · 2015
Trajectory planning and guidance are presented as successive steps in the process of solving problems related to the control of autonomous vehicles, with a focus on scenarios in which motion can be assumed to be planar. The exposition of relevant methods and results is structured in a manner that brings to the fore the principle of decomposing a given problem into subproblems whose solutions are analytically and computationally tractable, and can be synthesized to yield control algorithms amenable to real‐time implementation. To this end, widely used kinematic models, for example, the Dubins and Reeds–Shepp vehicles, are presented and analyzed, along with more recent extensions thereof. Such models are useful abstractions, albeit not sufficiently granular to capture the complexities of real‐world vehicles. Therefore, the analysis of the kinematic models is followed by methods for applying guidance laws that allow any vehicle that implements them to track the trajectories generated by means of the kinematic models within some margin of error. Trajectory planning and guidance are established and active research areas that are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, especially in the context of autonomous systems; the list of references at the end of the chapter is intended as a complement to the necessarily selective choice of material presented herein.