Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Mining Trucks Considering Terrain Constraints

There are many constraints to be considered to plan a safe and feasible trajectory for autonomous mining trucks due to the rough terrain in open-pit mines. It is difficult to handle these constraints uniformly within a trajectory planning framework. To overcome this limitation, a novel trajectory planning framework is proposed in this paper. Different from many existing studies which characterized the spatial positions of vehicles at the sampling time points as decision variables, we characterize the time points at the sampling spatial positions as decision variables to conveniently address the terrain constraints. Based on such a formulation, we further consider the kinematic constraints, engine power constraints and time window constraints. Various objectives (e.g., transport efficiency, fuel economy) can be considered in this trajectory planning framework, and the formulated trajectory planning problems can be efficiently solved. Finally, several case studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory planning framework.