Nonholonomic multibody mobile robots: controllability and motion planning in the presence of obstacles

It is shown that the well-known controllability rank condition theorem is applicable to nonholonomic multibody robots, even when there are inequality constraints on the velocity. This makes it possible to subsume and generalize several controllability results published in the robotics literature concerning nonholonomic mobile robots, and to infer new results. Also described is an implemented planner based on these results. Experimental results obtained with this planar are given.<
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