Real-Time Path Generation and Alignment Control for Autonomous Curb Following

Curb following is a key technology for autonomous road sweeping vehicles. Currently, existing implementations primarily involve pre-recording waypoints during human driving and subsequently retracing them autonomously. Moreover, existing research related to this topic predominately focuses on curb detection for driver assistance, yet the resultant curb detection outcomes remain underutilized in the development of autonomous curb following systems. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a real-time path generation and alignment control approach to facilitate autonomous curb following. Firstly, a segmented path generation algorithm is introduced that progressively generates reference path segments while ensuring the overall continuity of the reference path. Secondly, a parameterized alignment control algorithm is developed to accurately navigate the vehicle along the planned reference path with proved stability. Real public road experiments have been conducted to validate the proposed approach. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodologies across various curb following scenarios, including common concave, convex, and straight-concave curbs, thereby showcasing the practical viability of our methods in real-world applications.