This paper studies motion planning from one zero-velocity state to another for a three-joint robot in a horizontal plane with a passive revolute third joint. Such a robot is small-time locally controllable on an open subset of its zero-velocity section, allowing it to follow any path in this subset arbitrarily closely. However, some paths are “preferred” by the dynamics of the manipulator in th...

In this paper, path planning of wheeled mobile robots is investigated in presence of environmental obstacles based on potential field method. To do this, nonlinear dynamic equations of the mobile robot are derived with the respect of its nonholonomic constraints. To avoid the obstacles during the robot’s motion, repulsive potential functions are used. By implementation of potential field method...

Motion-planning for autonomous vehicles involves a two-level planning hierarchy: a high-level task-planning algorithm and a lower-level trajectory generation algorithm. The task planner operates on a discrete structure, such as a graph, whereas the trajectory generator operates on a dynamical system with a continuous state space. The problem of ensuring “compatibility” between these two planner...

In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In Part I, we presented the mathematical foundation of our framework, where we model motion discomfort as a weighted cost functional and define comfortable motion planning as a nonlinear constrained o...

This paper considers the problem of motion planning for a nonholonomic unicycle despite uncertainty that scales both the forward speed and the turning rate by an unknown but bounded constant. We model the unicycle as an ensemble control system, show that the position of this ensemble is controllable, and derive motion planning algorithms to steer this position between a given start and goal. We...

This paper presents an operational framework to bridge the gap between planning with uncertainty and real-time sensor-based motion control. The environment being known, a planner produces a plan composed of free space and sensor-based motion commands. The representations of uncertainty and its evolution, environment landmarks, and actions generated at the planning level are discussed. Sensor-ba...

The motion planning method of lane change for intelligent vehicle is an important component in the autonomous vehicle field. In order to make the intelligent vehicle drive on the urban environmental road smoothly when there is a barrier in the front, a new curvature-continuous obstacle avoidance trajectory planning method was introduced. The trajectory planning method based B-spline curves and ...

This paper presents the first motion planning methodology applicable to articulated, non-point nonholonomic robots with guaranteed collision avoidance and convergence properties. It is based on a new class of nonsmooth Lyapunov functions (DILFs) and a novel extension of the navigation function method to account for non-point articulated robots. The Dipolar Inverse Lyapunov Functions introduced ...