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Title: A motion planner for nonholonomic mobile robots

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States)
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/70.326564· OSTI ID:7177000
; ;  [1];  [2]
  1. LAA/CNRS, Toulouse (France)
  2. California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, CA (United States). Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

This paper considers the problems of motion planning for a car-like robot (i.e., a mobile robot with a nonholonomic constraint whose turning radius is lower-bounded). The authors present a fast and exact planner for their mobile robot model, based upon recursive subdivision of a collision-free path generated by a lower-level geometric planner that ignores the motion constraints. The resultant trajectory is optimized to give a path that is of near-minimal length in its homotopy class. Their claims of high speed are supported by experimental results for implementations that assume a robot moving amid polygonal obstacles. The completeness and the complexity of the algorithm are proven using an appropriate metric in the configuration space R[sup 2] [times] S[sup 1] of the robot. This metric is defined by using the length of the shortest paths in the absence of obstacles as the distance between two configurations. The authors prove that the new induced topology and the classical one are the same. Although the authors concentrate upon the car-like robot, the generalization of these techniques leads to new theoretical issues involving sub-Riemannian geometry and to practical results for nonholonomic motion planning.

OSTI ID:
7177000
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States), Vol. 10:5; ISSN 1042-296X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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