ABSTRACT
T HIS CHAPTER emphasizes the fact that it is not absolutely mandatory (as com-monly admitted and broadly used in the literature) to have a predetermined trajectory to be followed by a robot to perform reliable and safe navigation in an urban and/or cluttered environment. A new definition of the navigation task, using only discrete waypoints in the environment, will be presented and applied for an urban electric vehicle. This approach permits us to reduce the computational costs and leads to an even more flexible navigation with respect to traditional approaches (mainly if the environment is cluttered and/or dynamic). In addition, several techniques are presented in this chapter to obtain the appropriate set of waypoints to perform reliable navigation; the most important is called OMWS-ET (for Optimal Multi-criteria Waypoint Selection based on Expanding Tree).
