Smooth motion planning for car-like vehicles

Abstract

Presents a steering method for a car-like vehicle providing smooth paths subjected to curvature constraints. We show how to integrate this steering method in a global motion planning scheme taking obstacles into account. The main idea of the paper is to consider the car as a 4-D system from a kinematic point of view and as a 3-D system from a geometric point of view of collision checking. The resulting planned motions are guaranteed to be collision-free and C/sup 2/ between two cusp points.