Optimal Direction-Dependent Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Alex Shum · 2014
I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii The focus of this thesis is optimal path planning. The path planning problem is posed as an optimal control problem, for which the viscosity solution to the static Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is used to determine the optimal path. The Ordered Upwind Method (OUM) has been previously used to numerically approximate the viscosity solution of the static HJB equation for direction-dependent weights. The contributions of this thesis include an analytical bound on the convergence rate of the OUM for the boundary value problem to the viscosity solution of the HJB equation. The convergence result provided in this thesis is to our knowledge the tightest existing bound on the convergence order of OUM solutions to the viscosity solution of the static HJB equation. Only convergence without any guarantee of rate has been previously shown.