Experimental Comparison of Trajectory Planning Algorithms for Wheeled Mobile Robots

In this paper, we present an experimental approach to compare various trajectory planning methods for practical application of wheeled mobile robots. The first method generates a trajectory according to the acceleration limits of the mobile robot and its relationship with the curvature of the planned path. The second method is an improvement of the conventional convolution-based trajectory generation method, on which the heading angles of a curved path is being considered. Due to the limited scope of the considered constraints of the previous approaches, A third approach that conserves the merits of the convolution operator is proposed to consider the high curvature turning points of a sophisticated curve such as a Lemniscate of Gerono,which causes geometrical limitations during robot navigation. All methods are compared experimentally on a two-wheeled mobile robot. The goal of the experiment is to determine which approach meets the criteria of time optimality and sampling time uniformity while considering the physical limits of the mobile robot and the geometrical constraints of the planned path.