Continuous Curvature Turns Based Method for Least Maximum Curvature Path Generation of Autonomous Vehicle

Safe driving and stable paths are essential for the autonomous vehicle navigation, that large and fast steering angle should be avoided. This paper addresses a local path generation problem for autonomous vehicles while the least maximum curvature and the shortest length are obtained with limited curvature rate. The properties of the novel feasible paths based on continuous curvature turns are investigated. And a simple and fast computational method is presented to solve the problem by iterative procedure. The simulation in this paper shows that, compared with recent researches, the performance of least maximum curvature and shortest length is obtained by the novel local path planner, and the driving behavior is closer to the human driver operation.