Fast nonlinear model predictive planner and control for an unmanned ground vehicle in the presence of disturbances and dynamic obstacles

This paper presents a solution for the tracking control problem, for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), under the presence of skid-slip and external disturbances in an environment with static and moving obstacles. To achieve the proposed task, we have used a path-planner which is based on fast nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC); the planner generates feasible trajectories for the kinematic and dynamic controllers to drive the vehicle safely to the goal location. Additionally, the NMPC deals with dynamic and static obstacles in the environment. A kinematic controller (KC) is designed using evolutionary programming (EP), which tunes the gains of the KC. The velocity commands, generated by KC, are then fed to a dynamic controller, which jointly operates with a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) to prevent the effects of perturbations. Furthermore, pseudo priority queues (PPQ) based Dijkstra algorithm is combined with NMPC to propose optimal path to perform map-based practical simulation. Finally, simulation based experiments are performed to verify the technique. Results suggest that the proposed method can accurately work, in real-time under limited processing resources.