Application improvement of A* algorithm in intelligent vehicle trajectory planning

Trajectory planning is one of the key technologies for autonomous driving. A* algorithm is a classical trajectory planning algorithm that has good results in the field of robot path planning. However, there are still some practical problems to be solved when the algorithm is applied to vehicles, such as the algorithm fails to consider the vehicle contours, the planned path is not smooth, and it lacks speed planning. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a path processing method and a path tracking method for the A* algorithm. First, the method of configuring safe redundancy space is given considering the vehicle contour, then, the path is generated based on A* algorithm and smoothed using Bessel curve, and the speed is planned based on the curvature of the path. The trajectory tracking algorithm in this paper is based on an expert system and pure tracking theory. In terms of speed tracking, an expert system for the acceleration characteristics of the vehicle is constructed and used as a priori information for speed control, and good results are obtained. In terms of path tracking, the required steering wheel angle is calculated based on pure tracking theory, and the influence factor of speed on steering is obtained from test data, based on which the steering wheel angle is corrected and the accuracy of path tracking is improved. In addition, this paper proposes a target point selection method for the pure tracking algorithm to improve the stability of vehicle directional control. Finally, a simulation analysis of the proposed method is performed. The results show that the method can improve the applicability of the A* algorithm in automated vehicle planning.