Collision-free path planning for nonholonomic mobile robots using a new obstacle representation in the velocity space

Abstract

This paper presents a collision-free path planner for mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment subject to nonholonomic constraints. This planner is well adapted for use with embarked sensors, because it uses only the distance information between the robot and the obstacles. The collision-free path-planning is based on a new representation of the obstacles in the velocity space. The obstacles in the influence zone are mapped as linear constraints into the velocity space of the robot, forming a convex subset that represents the velocities that the robot can use without collision with the objects. The planner is composed by two modules, termed “reaching the goal” and “boundary following”. The major advantages of this method are the very short calculation time and a continuous stable behavior of the velocities. The results presented demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method for solving the collision-free path-planning problem.

Extending obstacle avoidance methods through multiple parameter-space transformations

“…Most approaches that deal with any-shape, kinematicallyconstrained robots work with another simplification of C-Space: the velocity space (Arras et al 2002;Feiten et al 1994;Ramirez and Zeghloul 2001;Schlegel 1998;Simmons 1996), or V-Space for short. For the mobile robots of our interest, V-Space represents the space of the potential linear and angular robot velocities, hence the next movement can be chosen as a point in V-Space that results in constant curvature paths (i.e.…”

“…There are some exceptions (Ramirez and Zeghloul 2001;Xu and Yang 2002) that make use of straight paths, but this model is not appropriate for most actual mobile robots. Only these two path models have been reported in the reactive collision avoidance literature.…”

“…stands for differential driven, tricycle, and car-like nonholonomic robots (Ramirez and Zeghloul 2001). In general, this expression may not be integrable, thus an analytical expression for P(α, t) will not be available for arbitrary design functions.…”

Feedback stabilization of a nonholonomic system with potential fields: application to a two-wheeled mobile robot among obstacles

“…Other approaches to obtain feasible collision-free trajectories for nonholonomic mobile robots have been proposed based on differential flatness [10,11], iterative calculation [12][13][14] and so on [15][16][17][18][19]. As a practical approach for obstacle avoidance, sensor-based reactive navigation has also been studied [20][21][22].…”

Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance Using Potential Field for a Nonholonomic Vehicle

“…A path of vehicle's position and orientation should be searched in this space by probabilistic roadmap method (Kavraki et al, 1996) for example. There are some studies considering both shape of vehicle's body and nonholonomic motion (Kondak & Hommel, 2001;Minguez et al, 2006;Ramirez & Zeghloul, 2001). It is very difficult problem to search a path in the configuration space under the motion constraint.…”