Preface

The full implementation of autonomous vehicles on a large scale, despite appearing to be far off, is inevitable. One of the biggest challenges for autonomous vehicle navigation and manoeuvrability is to assure the vehicle's ability to react instantaneously to potential hazards in its environment. This requires the formulation of a dependable path planning strategy. Path planning re-plans the autonomous vehicle's original reference trajectory based on the environmental information provided by the vehicle's perception modules. Despite the amount of work done in the areas of autonomous vehicles and mobile robots, real-time implementation still faces some challenges. This is due to the dynamic nature of the real world. For example, a commonly traversable road can suddenly be subject to continuous changes in its landscape due to reconstruction, thus creating hindrances for driverless navigation. This requires dependable planning modules for the driverless platform to provide reliable reference routes for the vehicle. Regarding autonomous mobile robots, manoeuvring in a narrow and scattered environment is also a challenge. Thus path planning is a challenge to be addressed in many fields.

This book is based on our combined experiences in the fields of automated driving and vehicle controls. The editors are experienced researchers from Finland, Turkey, the United States, Canada, and Malaysia who have worked extensively in the field of autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. We would like to thank all of the reviewers and authors involved in creating this volume.

In this book, we provide introductory ideas on the topic of 'path planning' to not only researchers but interested readers alike. The content is not limited to path planning algorithm formulation for road vehicles; it also explores the topic in the context of mobile robots, off-road scenarios, multi-robot motion, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, 'Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles' provides the introduction to the book. It includes a discussion of the factors that influence path planning for autonomous military vehicles. The second section, 'Path Planning in Varied Environments', discusses path planning as it relates to different use cases, such as off-road vehicles and UAVs, and the themes of unknown environment exploration. The final section, 'Towards an Optimal Path Planning', explores path planning in the off-road scenario, followed by a discussion of optimizing driverless navigation by integrating path planning and control strategies.

In conclusion, for wide implementation of autonomous vehicles to come to fruition, the question is not 'Can it be done?' but rather 'How do we do it safely?' The first

**II**

**Chapter 7 101**

**Chapter 8 119** Distributed Optimization of Multi-Robot Motion with Time-Energy Criterion

Path Planning Optimization with Flexible Remote Sensing Application

*by Mohamad T. Shahab and Moustafa Elshafei*

*by Agoston Restas*

step in answering this question is a discussion of path planning as presented in this book.

> **Dr. Umar Zakir Abdul Hamid** Sensible 4 Oy, Finland

### **Dr. Volkan Sezer**

Associate Professor, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
