TR2017-122

From Reeds-Shepp's paths to continuous curvature path - Part I: transition schemes & algorithms

    •  Dai, J., Wang, Y., Bortoff, S.A., Burns, D.J., "From Reeds-Shepp's paths to continuous curvature path - Part I: transition schemes & algorithms", IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications, DOI: 10.1109/​CCTA.2017.8062488, August 2017.
      BibTeX TR2017-122 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Dai2017aug,
      • author = {Dai, Jin and Wang, Yebin and Bortoff, Scott A. and Burns, Daniel J.},
      • title = {From Reeds-Shepp's paths to continuous curvature path - Part I: transition schemes & algorithms},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications},
      • year = 2017,
      • month = aug,
      • doi = {10.1109/CCTA.2017.8062488},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2017-122}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Control, Robotics

Abstract:

This work considers real-time continuous curvature (CC) path planning for car-like robots. It is motivated by the fact that Reeds-Shepp's (RS) based path planning remains unmatched in terms of computation efficiency and reliability when compared with various CC path planning results. Similar to [1], this paper post-processes RS paths to enforce the CC property, while ensuring CC paths contained in a neighborhood of the RS paths to maintain obstacle clearance. Targeting to alleviate concerns about reliability and computational efficiency, we exploit the geometric insights casted by µ tangency conditions [2] to post-process RS paths. Specifically, distinctive postprocessing scheme is devised offline for each type of discontinuous curvature junctions. The proposed schemes, though suboptimal, are straightforward, and result in CC path planning with guaranteed completeness at the negligible increase of computation. Effectiveness of proposed schemes and resultant algorithms is validated by numerical simulations.