Incorporating body dynamics into the sensor-based motion planning paradigm. The maximum turn strategy

Abstract

The existing approaches to sensor-based motion planning tend to deal solely with kinematic and geometric issues, and ignore the system dynamics. This work attempts to incorporate body dynamics into the paradigm of sensor-based motion planning. The authors consider the case of a mass point robot operating in a planar environment with unknown arbitrary stationary obstacles. Given the constraints on the robot's dynamics, sensing, and control means, conditions are formulated for generating trajectories which guarantee convergence and the robot's safety at all times. The approach calls for continuous computation and is fast enough for real time implementation. The robot plans its motion based on its velocity, control means, and sensing information about the surrounding obstacles, and such that in case of a sudden potential collision it can always resort to a safe emergency stopping path. Simulated examples demonstrate the algorithm's performance.