Efficient Path Interpolation and Speed Profile Computation for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots
This work addresses path planning and motion control for mobile robots in competitions like Eurobot, representing an incremental improvement with domain-specific applications.
The paper tackles the problem of generating smooth, obstacle-avoiding paths and time-optimal speed profiles for nonholonomic mobile robots, achieving a simpler, real-time solution with bounded curvature and a linear-time algorithm for speed computation.
This paper studies path synthesis for nonholonomic mobile robots moving in two-dimensional space. We first address the problem of interpolating paths expressed as sequences of straight line segments, such as those produced by some planning algorithms, into smooth curves that can be followed without stopping. Our solution has the advantage of being simpler than other existing approaches, and has a low computational cost that allows a real-time implementation. It produces discretized paths on which curvature and variation of curvature are bounded at all points, and preserves obstacle clearance. Then, we consider the problem of computing a time-optimal speed profile for such paths. We introduce an algorithm that solves this problem in linear time, and that is able to take into account a broader class of physical constraints than other solutions. Our contributions have been implemented and evaluated in the framework of the Eurobot contest.