The jogger's problem: accounting for body dynamics in real-time motion planning

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 point mass mobile robot operating in a planar environment with unknown stationary obstacles of arbitrary shape. Given the constraints on the robot's dynamics, sensing, and control means, conditions are formulated for generating collision-free trajectories with guaranteed convergence. The approach calls for continuous computation and is fast enough for real time implementation. Based on its velocity and sensing data, the robot continuously plans its motion based on the canonical solution which presents the time-optimal path within the robot's current sensing range. For a special case of a sudden potential collision an option of a safe emergency stopping path is always maintained. Simulated examples demonstrate the algorithm's performance.