Autonomous vehicles navigation strategies enforcing safety with control barrier functions

Autonomous vehicles have been a constant study area with many different areas to be exploited, one of them being regarding the navigation problem, and in this research we will be focused on certain technique that has been put into the spotlight recently, the proposed method will be tested both on a Matlab simulation and then on a physical platform known as Qcar developed by Quanser. The proposed solution to the safety problem while performing a navigation task was designed to drive our system, in this case an Ackerman steered vehicle through a predefined trajectory while avoiding an obstacle that is not on the original planning of the route, the design of this restriction has the inherent property of being already mathematically proved to enforce safety if designed correctly. The designed solution is to be tested with a simple pure pursuit control algorithm and once it is proven that can drive the system through the desired trajectory on simulation, it will be modified so it can be tested on the platform present on campus, given that the software that runs on it is closed and not open to modifications, it will require the implementation of Python libraries to run correctly, and given the nature of the platform a simplified version of the algorithm will be needed, this is further discussed on this document, video, code and experiments can be found on the results section of this document.