Fastest motion planning for an unmanned vehicle in the presence of accelerating obstacles

Estimating the fastest trajectory is one of the main challenges in autonomous vehicle research. It is fundamental that the vehicle determines its path not only to minimize travel time, but to arrive at the destination safely by avoiding any obstacles that may be in collision route. In this paper, we consider estimating the trajectory and acceleration functions of the trip simultaneously with an optimization objective function. By approximating the trajectory and acceleration function with B-splines, we transform an infinite-dimensional problem into a finite-dimensional one. Obstacle avoidance and kinematic constraints are carried out with the addition of a penalization function that penalizes trajectories and acceleration functions that do not satisfy the vehicles’ constraints or that are in a collision route with other obstacles. Our approach is designed to model observations of the obstacles that contain measurement errors, which incorporates the realistic stochasticity of radars and sensors. We show that, as the number of observations increases, the estimated optimization function converges to the optimal one where the obstacles’ positions are known. Moreover, we show that the estimated optimization function has a minimizer and that its minimizers converge to the minimizers of the optimization function involving the true threat zones.