A Wall-Following Navigation Method for Autonomous Driving Based on Lidar in Tunnel Scenes

Wall following navigation uses the wall to guide the robot or vehicle to move from one position to another and always keep a certain distance from the wall in this process. It is of great significance in some aspects, such as rapid disease detection and auxiliary equipment detection of tunnel. This paper proposes an automatic wall following navigation method based on lidar to solve the existing problems in the tunnel scenes. Firstly, the mathematical model of spatial coordinate transformation among vehicle, point cloud, and the wall is established, and the RANSAC algorithm is used to improve the quality of point cloud of lidar. Then, according to the kinematic model of the autonomous vehicle, an improved pure pursuit wall following algorithm is proposed for lateral vehicle control, and the wall following mathematical model is established. Finally, the algorithm is verified in the two wall-following navigation cases under the tunnel wall, which shows that this method has a good tracking effect and stability.