UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    AN ADAPTIVELY SAMPLED PATH PLANNER USING WAYPOINTS: AN ANY-ANGLE VARIANT
    (2014) Gefen, Yonatan; Martins, Nuno C; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis develops a low-cost grid-based path planner that intrinsically supports smooth, curved vehicle dynamics. There are many advantages to grid-based planners, including working natively in the digital space of most sensors, and efficiency in low dimensional space. However, discrete planners create jaggedness in most paths. Further, the dimensionality must be limited for efficiency, usually by limiting vehicle steering angles to a small finite set. The algorithm presented here, Waypoint-A*, extends A* to produce low-cost curved trajectories, taking the dynamics of the vehicle into account explicitly post-planning. Considering the path generated by A* as composed of a set of waypoints, Waypoint-A* calculates the minimum-cost heading on a continuum, to direct the vehicle to the waypoint at the location resulting in the lowest total cost. Smoothness of these curves is invariant to terrain resolution and computation.