Incorporating body dynamics into sensor-based motion planning: the maximum turn strategy

The existing approaches to sensor-based motion planning tend to deal solely with kinematic and geometric issues, and ignore the system dynamics. This work attempts to incorporate body dynamics into the paradigm of sensor-based motion planning. We consider the case of a mobile robot operating in a planar environment with unknown arbitrary stationary obstacles. Given the constraints on the robot's dynamics, sensing, and control means, conditions are formulated for generating trajectories which guarantee convergence and the robot's safety at all times. The approach calls for continuous computation and is fast enough for real time implementation. Based on its current velocity and sensing information about the surrounding obstacles, the robot plans its motion so as to nish any maneuver in the shortest possible time, and such that a sudden potential collision can be avoided via a safe emergency stopping path. The resulting motion planning algorithm is shown to be convergent. Simulated examples demonstrate its performance.