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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Previous work has presented the time optimal trajectories for three classes of non-holonomic mobile robots: steered cars that can only go forwards, steered cars that go forwards or backwards, and differential drives. Each of the vehicles is modelled as a rigid body in the plane with velocity and angular velocity controls. The systems are differentiated only by the bounds on the controls, but the optimal trajectories are qualitatively different for each system. We explore this difference by considering the effect that control bounds have on the extremal trajectories of bounded velocity vehicles, where the extremal trajectories are defined to be the set of trajectories that satisfy Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, a necessary condition for optimality.

Keywords

time optimal trajectories, mobiile robots, Pontryagin, Extremal trajectories, kinematics models of mobile robots

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for the Foundations of Robotics

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Manipulation Lab

Associated Project(s): Desktop Robotics

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Devin Balkcom and Matthew T. Mason, "Extremal Trajectories for Bounded Velocity Mobile Robots," ICRA, May, 2002.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Balkcom_2002_3998,
   author = "Devin Balkcom and Matthew T. Mason",
   title = "Extremal Trajectories for Bounded Velocity Mobile Robots",
   booktitle = "ICRA",
   month = "May",
   year = "2002",
}

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