Curvature-Bounded Traversability Analysis for Motion Planning of Mobile Robots

We consider the geometric problem of deciding whether a narrow planar passage can be traversed by a curve that satisfies pre-specified upper bounds on its curvature. This problem is of importance for pathand motion-planning of autonomous mobile robots, particularly when vehicle dynamical constraints are considered during planning. For a special case of narrow passages, namely, rectangular channels, we discuss a fast numerical algorithm to determine if a given channel may be traversed by curvature-bounded paths. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can affirm traversability in cases where the most recent result available in the literature fails.