A study of autonomous mobile system in outdoor environment. III. Local path planning for a nonholonomic mobile robot by chained form

This paper presents the path planning/control method of a car-like mobile robot. The proposed two-stage path planner consists of the global path planner and the local path planner. The global path planner finds collision-free paths from an environmental map, which features universal consideration of the topological configuration of all obstacles by the method of Maklink Graph. The local path planner/controller linearises the robot dynamics by using the chained form and accomplishes a closed-loop control. This satisfies the nonholonomic constraints and obtains robustness toward model errors, drift and disturbances. Obstacle avoidance experiments show that the proposed method can successfully plan a collision-free path in a cluttered environment and navigate the robot to the goal with high trajectory accuracy.