Near-optimal dynamic trajectory generation and control of an omnidirectional vehicle

This paper describes a computationally inexpensive, yet high performance trajectory generation algorithm for omnidirectional vehicles. It is shown that the associated nonlinear control problem can be made tractable by restricting the set of admissible control functions. The resulting problem is linear with coupled control efforts and a near-optimal control strategy is shown to be piecewise constant (bang-bang type). A very favorable trade-off between optimality and computational efficiency is achieved. The proposed algorithm is based on a small number of evaluations of simple closed-form expressions and is thus extremely efficient. The low computational cost makes this method ideal for path planning in dynamic environments.