Fast and Accurate Trajectory Generation for Non-Circular Omnidirectional Robots in Industrial Applications

This paper presents a new approach for fast and accurate generation of cubic spline trajectories for non-circular omnidirectional mobile robots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs). This method can be combined with any existing path planner or guidance system for offline calculation of trajectories with independent translational and rotational movement. In addition trough fast computation this approach is also suited for online generation of trajectories, in example for collision avoidance. The focus of this approach is on industrial applications, that’s why accurate trajectories, accelerations and velocities of robots have to be predictable. For that reason, first a curvature continuous trajectory is generated with the use of cubic splines and after that two velocity-time-profiles for translational and rotational movement with predefined maximum accelerations and velocities are calculated for each spline segment. Velocity-time-profiles are used to calculate poses and velocities for a closed-loop control, which generates the drive commands. In addition a Monte Carlo Particle Filter based localization is used to follow the planned trajectory. The compensation trajectories that lead the robot or AGV after a pose update back on the planned trajectory are computed with quintic bézier splines. Experiments on real robots show the capable use for industrial applications.