A safe and robust path following planner for wheeled robots

This paper addresses the problem of planning a path following, robust with respect to small localization errors, allowing a mobile robot to reach safely its goal. A path planning method dealing with uncertainties is proposed where both uncertainty in localization and in control of a nonholonomic mobile robot are managed. The safeness of this method is due to the combination of the planning phase and the navigation phase by using the same localization and control processes. The localization process realized the multisensor fusion of data provided by a ring of telemetric sensors in combination with a dead-reckoning system. The robustness is due to a stabilizing controller on which the system remains stable when estimated values are used for feedback instead of exact ones. By determining a compact attractive domain bounding the regulation error, we dynamically compute a security margin during the path planning. This security margin ensures the safeness of the planned path.