Path planning is an essential function in an intelligent vehicle, especially when driving in scenarios cluttered by large-scale static obstacles. Traditional path planners often struggle to find a balance among speed, accuracy, and optimality in their solutions. In this paper, we introduce an Adaptive Pure Pursuit (APP) planner, which is designed to be fast and near-optimal for autonomous driving in cluttered environments. The APP planner generates feasible paths through a simulated closed-loop tracking control process of a virtual vehicle. If a derived path encounters obstacles, an adaptive refinement step is taken to locally reduce these collisions. Unlike search-based planners that suffer from the “curse of dimensionality” and optimization-based methods that often run slowly, the APP planner operates extremely fast. The high speed stems from the fact that both the virtual controller simulation and the refinement step involve computations with zero degrees of freedom. The proposed APP planner outperforms the prevalent optimization-based and search-based path planners, as shown by comparative simulations. Real-world experiments were also conducted to validate the APP planner, and its source codes are provided at https://github.com/libai1943/Adaptive_Pure_Pursuit_Planner .

Dispatching and cooperative trajectory planning for multiple autonomous forklifts in a warehouse is a widely applied research topic. The conventional methods in this domain regard dispatching and planning as isolated procedures, which render the overall motion quality of the forklift team imperfect. The dispatching and planning problems should be considered simultaneously to achieve optimal cooperative trajectories. However, this approach renders a large-scale nonconvex problem, which is extremely difficult to solve in real time. A joint dispatching and planning method is proposed to balance solution quality and speed. The proposed method is characterized by its fast runtime, light computational burden, and high solution quality. In particular, the candidate goals of each forklift are enumerated. Each candidate dispatch solution is measured after concrete trajectories are generated via an improved hybrid A* search algorithm, which is incorporated with an artificial neural network to improve the cost evaluation process. The proposed joint dispatching and planning method is computationally cheap, kinematically feasible, avoids collisions with obstacles/forklifts, and finds the global optimum quickly. The presented motion planning strategy demonstrates that the integration of a neural network with the dispatching approach leads to a warehouse filling/emptying mission completion time that is 2% shorter than the most efficient strategy lacking machine-learning integration. Notably, the mission completion times across these strategies vary by approximately 15%.