Trajectory planning for a car-like robot by environment abstraction

This work proposes a fully automatic planning and control strategy for solving a navigation problem for a car-like robot with non-negligible size and constraint control inputs. The approach uses cell decompositions for abstracting the robot behavior to a final state description on which the planning problem is solved. As part of the solution, we obtain a ranking of different cell decomposition types that are suitable for planning the motion of a car-like robot. The originality of our method mainly comes from the iterative procedure for finding a feasible path based on cell decompositions. Although the approach is not complete, it benefits from a fully-automatic planning and control strategy and from a reduced computational complexity. The solution is implemented as a user-friendly freely-downloadable MATLAB package. This may come as a handy tool for employing the strategy for automatic planning and control of a car-like robot in a real scenario. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.