NONHOLONOMIC, BOUNDED CURVATURE PATH PLANNING IN CLUTTERED ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract The problem of planning a path for a robot vehicle amidst obstacles is considered. The kinematics of the vehicle being considered are of the unicycle or car-like type, i.e. are subject to nonhcJonomic constraints. Moreover, the trajectories of the robot are supposed not to exceed a iven bound on curvature, that incorporates physical limitations of the allowable minimum turning radius for the vehicle. The presented method attempts at extending Reeds and Shepp's results on shortest paths of bounded curvature in absence of obstacles, to the case where obstacles are present in the workspace. The method does not require explicit construction of the configuration space, nor employs a preliminary phase of holonomic trajectory planning. Successfull outcomes of the proposed technique are paths consisting of a simple composition of Reeds/Shepp paths that solves the problem. For a particular vehicle shape, the path provided by the method, if regular, is also the shortest feasible path. In its original version, however, the method may fail to find a path, even though one may exist (path-completeness not guaranteed). Most such empasses can be overcome by use of a few simple heuristics suggested in the text. Applications to both unicycle and car-like (bicycle) mobile robots of general shape are described and their performance and practicality discussed