Continuous-Curvature Control of Mobile Robots with Constrained Kinematics

Abstract The main contribution of the paper is to provide a method to generate continuous-curvature paths in order to perform the kinematic control of a wheeled mobile robot, based on combinations of clothoids, line segments and circular arcs. Higher benefits on comfort and safety can be obtained when generating continuous-curvature paths, which is very important in transporting people or dangerous goods. Generated paths take also into account lower and upper bounds of sharpness and curvature simultaneously, while it is not the case of many kinematic controllers like pure-pursuit control. The proposed kinematic controller determines a continuous-curvature path to reach a target configuration by recomputing the whole path every step, applying next curvature planned in the curvature profile. The new method can be easily combined with global planners and vision systems that give some way-points to be followed. For that purpose, some simulations show that proposed method can solve problems with different complexity such as line following problem, path tracking, lane changing and overtaking. Finally, an analysis to evaluate the performance of the new method against pure-pursuit is done.

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