Study of feasible trajectory generation algorithms for control of planar mobile robots

For achieving acceptable control performance and execution efficiency of planar mobile robots, certain suitable trajectories are generated in real-time under the constraints of robot dynamics and associated environment. In this paper, three trajectory generation approaches, namely the "line", "arc-line", "B-spline" algorithms, for planar mobile robots are studied. For the "line" trajectory, the robot should rotate at the start and target points. Hence, they are only suitable for holonomic robots. The second set of trajectories generated by the "arc-line" algorithm are composed of several line and arc segments and might have discontinuous curvature at the transition points among these lines and arcs. The third set of trajectories generated by the B-spline algorithms could have continuous curvature. All the reference trajectories generated by these three algorithms are experimentally tested and compared on one actual mobile robot.