A multibody car system is a non-nilpotent, non-regular, triangularizable and well-controllable system. One goal of the current paper is to prove this obscure assertion. But its main goal is to explain and enlighten what it means. Motion planning is an already old and classical problem in Robotics. A few years ago a new instance of this problem has appeared in the literature : motion planning fo...

When users navigate through a terrain dataset, they typically control the camera directly. However, such control is difficult and often results in rather unsteady camera motions that can easily cause motion sickness, especially in virtual reality. In this paper we describe a new technique for automatic generation of a camera motion path using nonholonomic motion planning techniques. Using our a...

We present a steering algorithm for general nonholonomic systems which are not required to possess special properties such as flatness or exact nilpotentizability. The method makes use of local steering laws, with suitable contraction properties, designed on the basis of a continuous approximation of the system.

-In this paper, we investigate methods for steering systems with nonholonomic constraints between arbitrary configurations. Early work by Brockett derives the optimal controls for a set of canonical systems in which the tangent space to the configuration manifold is spanned by the input vector fields and their first order Lie brackets. Using Brockett’s result as motivation, we derive suboptimal...

This paper presents an implementation of a symmetric distributed reduced order motion planning algorithm for formation control of mobile robots that uses middleware services to access information throughout a wireless ad hoc network. The implementation was tested on four MICAbots in a square formation. We demonstrate that the reduced order motion control algorithm can be used to control formati...

Mobile robots that consist of a mobile platform with one or many manipulators, are of great interest in a number of applications. This paper presents a methodology for generating paths and trajectories for both the mobile platform and the manipulator that will take a system from an initial configuration to a pre-specified final one, without violating the nonholonomic constraint. The generated p...

This paper provides a method for a controllable nonholonomic mechanical system. By use of the nonholonomy of the disk’s rolling constraint in the plane and the condition of chained form conversion, a multi-joint nonholonomic manipulator, which uses only two actuators and can be converted into chained form and achieves control simplicity, is presented. The Frobenius and Chow theorems prove that ...

Many applications in mobile robotics require the safe execution of a collision-free motion to a goal position. Planning approaches are well suited for achieving a goal position in known static environments, while real-time obstacle avoidance methods allow reactive motion behavior in dynamic and unknown environments. This paper proposes the global dynamic window approach as a generatlization of ...