Continuous-curvature trajectory planning

Continuous-curvature paths play an important role in the area of driving robots: as vehicles usually cannot change the steering angle in zero-time, real trajectories must not have discontinuities in the curvature profile. Typical continuous-curvature paths are thus built of straight lines, arcs and clothoids. Due to the geometric nature of clothoids, some questions in the area of trajectory planning are difficult the answer – usually we need approximations here. In this paper we describe a full approach for continuous-curvature trajectory planning for mobile robots – it covers a maneuver-based planning with Viterbi optimization and geometric approximations required to construct the respective clothoid trajectories