Efficient Path Planning for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

This work addresses path planning for nonholonomic robots moving in two-dimensional space. The problem consists in computing a sequence of line segments that leads from the current configuration of the robot to a target location, while avoiding a given set of obstacles. We describe a planning algorithm that has the advantage of being very efficient, requiring less of one millisecond of CPU time for the case studies that we have considered, and produces short paths. Our method relies on a search in a Voronoi graph that characterizes the possible ways of moving around obstacles, followed by a string-pulling procedure aimed at improving the resulting path.