Steering Functions for Car-Like Robots

Overview

This package contains a C++ library that implements the following steering functions for car-like robots with limited turning radius (CC = continuous curvature, HC = hybrid curvature):

The package contains a [RViz] visualization, which has been tested with [ROS 1] Kinetic under Ubuntu 16.04.

A video of the steering functions integrated into the general motion planner Bidirectional RRT* can be found here.

For contributions, please check the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.

Purpose of the project

This software is a research prototype, originally developed for and published as part of the publication [2].

The software is not ready for production use. It has neither been developed nor tested for a specific use case. However, the license conditions of the applicable Open Source licenses allow you to adapt the software to your needs. Before using it in a safety relevant setting, make sure that the software fulfills your requirements and adjust it according to any applicable safety standards (e.g. ISO 26262).

Publications

If you use one of the above steering functions in your work, please cite the appropriate publication:

[1] H. Banzhaf et al., “From Footprints to Beliefprints: Motion Planning under Uncertainty for Maneuvering Automated Vehicles in Dense Scenarios,” in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2018.

[2] H. Banzhaf et al., “Hybrid Curvature Steer: A Novel Extend Function for Sampling-Based Nonholonomic Motion Planning in Tight Environments,” in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2017.

[3] L. E. Dubins, “On Curves of Minimal Length with a Constraint on Average Curvature, and with Prescribed Initial and Terminal Positions and Tangents,” in American Journal of Mathematics, 1957.

[4] J. Reeds and L. Shepp, “Optimal paths for a car that goes both forwards and backwards,” in Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 1990.

[5] T. Fraichard and A. Scheuer, “From Reeds and Shepp’s to Continuous-Curvature Paths,” in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2004.

License

The source code in this package is released under the Apache-2.0 License. For further details, see the LICENSE file.

The 3rdparty-licenses.txt contains a list of other open source components included in this package.

Dependencies

This package depends on the linear algebra library [Eigen], which can be installed by

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev

The [ROS 1] or [ROS 2] dependencies are listed in the package.xml and can be installed by

rosdep install steering_functions

Installation & Usage as a [ROS 1] or [ROS 2] package

Building

To build this package from source, clone it into your workspace and compile it in Release mode according to

cd my_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/hbanzhaf/steering_functions.git
catkin build steering_functions -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  # ROS 1
colcon build --packages-up-to steering_functions --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  # ROS 1 or ROS 2

To launch a [ROS 1] demo of the package, execute

source my_ws/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch steering_functions steering_functions.launch

Linking

Add this package as dependency to your package.xml

<depend>steering_functions</depend>

To link this library with another [ROS 1] package, add these lines to your package’s CMakeLists.txt

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS steering_functions)
include_directories(${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME}_node ${catkin_LIBRARIES})

Or for [ROS 2]:

find_package(steering_functions REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(your_target steering_functions::steering_functions)

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