A Spatial-Temporal Trajectory Planner for Center-articulated Vehicles

In this paper, a new local trajectory planning algorithm for center-articulated vehicles (CAVs) is proposed to generate safe and collision-free trajectories in structured or semistructured scenarios. The method is based on an optimization framework that is able to maintain high-precision constraints on the motion while ensuring safe obstacle avoidance. By converting the planning problem into an optimal control problem (OCP) and modeling the environment with irregular safety corridors, we are able to fully utilize the available space while ensuring safe obstacle avoidance. In addition, by eliminating all equality and inequality constraints, we reformulate the problem as an unconstrained optimization problem to accelerate the solution process. Simulation results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of efficiency, speed of solution, and safe obstacle avoidance. In order to promote the open-source community, we have made the project engineering open-source on [https://github.com/Photin1a/LoaderPlanner.git].