Simultaneous Collision Avoiding and Target Tracking for Unmanned Ground Vehicle with Velocity and Heading Rate Constraints

This paper develops a novel control method for solving the challenging problem of simultaneous collision avoidance and target tracking for an unmanned ground vehicle with velocity and heading rate constraints. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem where the trajectory tracking is treated as a soft constraint via control Lyapunov functions and obstacles avoidance is treated as hard constraint via control barrier functions. Two constraints are naturally unified in the context of quadratic programs which ensure that the hard constraint, soft constraint, velocity and heading rate constraints are satisfied simultaneously. Under the proposed strategy, an unmanned ground vehicle can avoid the stationary and moving obstacles while tracking the desired trajectory precisely and smoothly. Finally, three representative simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.