F1TENTH L10 - Pure Pursuit

In this lecture we will learn about the autonomous vehicle planning and control stack, and deep dive into the pure pursuit tracker.

We'll design a pure pursuit controller for our autonomous race cars to track a reference path through the environment. Pure Pursuit is an example of a geometric path tracking controller which relies on our kinematic vehicle model for selecting steering commands. It tracks a reference path using only the geometry of the vehicle kinematics and the reference path. In the case of our race cars, a geometric path tracking controller is a type of lateral controller that ignores dynamic forces on the vehicles and assumes the no-slip condition holds at the wheels. Because of its simple nature, it is very popular and useful in robotics and autonomous driving.