Motion Control for Fast Mobile Robots: A Trajectory-Based Approach

This paper presents an approach to motion control for fast mobile robots. The approach is based around the notion of a trajectory, which describes the time evolution of the robot's position, orientation and velocity over some finite interval. The use of trajectories allows us to take into account a wide range of dynamic effects, including (but not limited to) finite accelerations and wheel slip. As a result, this trajectory-based approach is able to produce robust behaviour at high speeds. This paper develops the basic formalism for the trajectorybased approach, and presents some preliminary results from simulation.