Disturbance-Parametrized Robust Lattice-based Motion Planning

This paper introduces a disturbance-parametrized (DP) robust lattice-based motion-planning framework for nonlinear systems affected by bounded disturbances. A key idea in this work is to rigorously exploit the available knowledge about the disturbance, starting already offline at the time when a library of DP motion primitives is computed and ending not before the motion has been executed online. Given an up-to-date-estimate of the disturbance, the lattice-based motion planner performs a graph search online, to non-conservatively compute a disturbance aware optimal motion plan with formally motivated margins to obstacles. This is done utilizing the DP motion primitives, around which tubes are generated utilizing a suitably designed robust controller. The sizes of the tubes are dependent on the upper bounds of the disturbance appearing in the error between the actual system trajectory and the DP nominal trajectory, which in turn along with the overall optimality of the plan is dependant on the user-selected resolution of the available disturbance estimates. Increasing the resolution of the disturbance parameter results in smaller sizes of tubes around the motion primitives and can significantly reduce the conservativeness compared to traditional approaches, thus increasing the performance of the computed motion plans. The proposed strategy is implemented on an Euler-Lagrange-based ship model which is affected by a significant wind disturbance and the efficiency of the strategy is validated through a suitable simulation example.
Funding: ELLIIT