Nonholonomic Path Planning for a Point Robot with Car-Like Kinematics

Abstract

A new approach of nonholonomic path planning for car-like robots is presented. The main idea is similar to many existing approaches which obtain a path in two phases. It is familiar in nonholonomic planning that at first a holonomic path is planned which is approximated by a nonholonomic one in a second step by subdividing it into smaller parts and replacing them with local paths fulfilling the kinematic constraints. These methods mostly rely on probabilistic methods and heuristic optimization. Our approach uses a holonomic preliminary path as well, but it serves only as a "loose guidance" to the second phase of the planning process. The final path is not required to contain any of the intermediate points of the preliminary path at all. The method is effective in environments consisting of narrow corridors but having wider free areas as well which can be used for maneuvering.