Optimized trajectory planning for mobile robot in the presence of moving obstacles

Navigation and obstacle avoidance are essential for mobile robots. In the dynamic environment, the obstacles may move with varying velocities. It is thus crucial to develop an effective scheme for moving obstacle avoidance. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose such a scheme based on parametric trajectory planning. With the conditions for collision avoidance formulated as the constraints, a feasible collision-free trajectory is then derived by solving an unconstrained optimization problem. The corresponding control torques for robot governing is calculated using the dynamic model and derived trajectory, with the information about the obstacle not known a priori. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

I. Introduction

Motion planning has been an important research topic for mobile robots [1]. It is required to plan a collision-free trajectory for controlling the mobile robot from the current position to the target while avoiding the objects, such as the wall or people. Many path planning approaches [1] based on the static obstacle information have been proposed. Meanwhile, in the dynamic environments, the obstacles may be moving with varying velocities. Moving obstacles may be detected when they move into the sensing range of the robot. The information on the moving obstacles is thus time-varying when it comes to the control of the mobile robot.