Collision-free path planning for mobile robot using cubic spiral

This paper presents a trajectory generation method for mobile robot moving in a constrained plane bounded by walls, which is frequently encountered in robot soccer games. The family of upper bounded curvature paths considered is made up of cubic spiral segments with zero-curvature ends and straight line segments through an intermediate orientation. The selection of potential intermediate orientations is not necessarily selected from the symmetric means circle of cubic spiral. A numerically efficient process, which is resorted to minimization over the length of generated path via linear programming and an approximate collision checking process, is presented to generate a collision-free path with shorter traveling distance. The implementation is straightforward so that the generation of collision-free paths is efficient for real-time applications in practice.