Timed Trajectory Generation Combined with an Extended Kalman Filter for a Vision-Based Autonomous Mobile Robot

Planning collision-free trajectories requires the combination of generation and modulation techniques. This is especially important if temporal stabilization of the generated trajectories is considered. Temporal stabilization means to conform to the planned movement time, in spite of environmental conditions or perturbations. This timing problem has not been addressed in most current robotic systems, and it is critical in several robotic tasks such as sequentially structured actions or human-robot interaction. This work focuses on generating trajectories for a mobile robot, whose goal is to reach a target within a constant time, independently of the world complexity. Trajectories are generated by nonlinear dynamical systems. Herein, we extend our previous work by including an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate the target location relative to the robot. A simulated hospital environment and a Pioneer 3-AT robot are used to demonstrate the robustness and reliability of the proposed approach in cluttered, dynamic and uncontrolled scenarios. Multiple experiments confirm that the inclusion of the EKF preserves the timing properties of the overall architecture.