Dynamic speed planning for safe navigation

Abstract

The paper deals with speed control for autonomous mobile robots. First a trajectory planner attaches a speed component to the postures of a path by considering speed limitations introduced by the vehicle and by task specifications. In order to provide robustness during task execution in the real world, environment feedback is used to dynamically adjust the speed of the vehicle to the presence of unexpected obstacles, both static and mobile. This is accomplished by combining the planned speed profile with the outputs of two reactive controllers. The system has been successfully implemented within the control architecture of the RAM-2 mobile robot.