Smooth Local Planning Incorporating Steering Constraints

EasyChair Preprint 1441

Abstract

In recent years large autonomous vehicles have become more common and especially for outdoor applications often feature four steerable wheels. While these allow the robot to perform more complex maneuvers than, e.g., Ackerman-drive vehicles, such maneuvers can require large changes in the steering angles that are only performed when standing to prevent physical damage to the robot due to mechanical stress. To provide a smooth path execution a local planner that computes velocity commands to follow a given path has to incorporate steering constraints to prevent the robot from stopping unnecessarily to turn its wheels. In this paper we introduce such a planner and two novel methods to incorporate steering constraints. Both are based on considering the instantaneous center of rotation (ICR) and allow only smooth ICR transitions. Extensive experiments in simulation and on the real robot show that our methods notable reduce standing times due to wheel reconfiguration while still accurately following a given path.

Keyphrases: ICR, Navigation, local planner, steering constraints

@booklet{EasyChair:1441,
  author    = {Freya Veronika Fleckenstein and Wera Winterhalter and Christian Dornhege and Cédric Pradalier and Wolfram Burgard},
  title     = {Smooth Local Planning Incorporating Steering Constraints},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1441},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}