Trajectory Planning of Autonomous Mobile Robot using Model Predictive Control in Human-Robot Shared Workspace

This paper proposes an integrated framework of trajectory planning and control for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in an intra-logistic scenario, where humans and robots share the same indoor workspace. The proposed framework consists of perception and trajectory planning. To perceive human motion, information from the RGB-D camera is used to detect human positions. Then a model-based tracking approach is employed to track multiple people’s motion and estimate their speed over a short time horizon. For trajectory planning, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based scheme is adopted to generate motor commands while taking into account energy efficiency, safety, and addressing human-aware proximity constraints. To convexify the nonlinear collision avoidance constraints, Sequential Convexification Programming is employed. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be implemented in real-time and efficiently avoid people in advance.