Towards Efficient Path Finding and Moving Stability-Focused Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robots

Nowadays, mobile robots play an important role in a variety of service scenarios. They need to plan and track trajectories to accomplish tasks such as delivery or guided tours. In such tasks, there are two remaining challenges: on one hand, the time and memory consumption of present path planners are still significant; on the other hand, service robots, which have a higher center of gravity, demand greater moving stability than that of current trajectory planners provide. To address these two challenges. Firstly, we propose a safety boundary first A* which fully utilizes environmental obstacle information to create a safety boundary and searches in it to quickly find an initial path. Secondly, we formulate the trajectory optimization problem as a nonlinear optimization problem, where the smoothness, safety, feasibility, and moving stability of the robot are taken into account. Furthermore, to constrain the robot's lateral acceleration, we design a time allocation algorithm based on non-uniform B-spline, enhancing the quality of the resulting trajectory. Simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that our algorithms significantly improve path search efficiency, enhance moving stability, reduce the difficulty of tracking, and improve the quality of task completion.