A Path Planning and Navigation Control System Design for Driverless Electric Bus

Extensive studies have been conducted on unmanned vehicle recently due to its bright prospect. However, few of them have studied the technology of driverless bus. In this paper, a path planning and navigation control system is designed for 12-m length driverless electric bus. The global path planning is adopted by the Dijkstra algorithm based on the analysis tool of ArcGIS. For local planning, a triple-layer finite-state machine is proposed to plan the driving maneuver, and it reduces computational complexity and improves driving effectiveness. Then, optimal trajectory is generated by a curve fitting technique based on path planning and driving maneuver, which takes full account of the safety and kinetics for driverless bus. In addition, we address the speed planning by expert rules to imitate an experienced driver. Finally, the trajectory tracking controller is devised by an adaptive rolling window. Moreover, a heading error compensation model and a self-adaptive strategy of controller parameters are set up to improve the control precision. Finally, simulation by TruckSim and scenes experiments verify the validity and practicability of our proposed path planning and navigation control system for driverless bus.