Nonholonomic mechanical systems naturally occur when there are rolling constraints [4] or Lagrangian symmetries leading to momentum constraints [1]. Examples include kinematic wheeled vehicles, free floating satellites with appendages, and simplified models of biomimetic locomotion. This work considers the local motion planning problem for a specific class of nonholonomic systems— those whose c...

This paper describes a prototype and analytical studies of a spherical rolling robot, a new design of a nonholonomic system. The spherical robot is driven by two remotely controlled, internally mounted rotors that induce the ball to roll and spin on a fiat surface. It is tracked on the plane by an overhead camera. A mathematical model of the robot's motion was developed using the nonholonomic c...

An active flexible needle is a self-actuating needle that can bend in the tissue and reach the clinical targets while avoiding anatomic obstacles. In robot-assisted needlebased medical procedures, motion planning is a vital aspect of operations. It is challenging due to the nonholonomic motion of the needle and the presence of anatomic obstacles and sensitive organs that must be avoided. We pro...

Achieving persistent autonomy requires unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to be able to deal with a wide variety of complex planning situations. In this paper, we introduce a model-predictive, local trajectory planning algorithm for USVs operating in congested and highly dynamic traffic. The planner generalizes the Velocity Obstacle concept to systems with non-linear dynamics, nonholonomic constr...

A mobile manipulator is defined as a robotic system composed of a nonholonomic mobile platform and a holonomic manipulator fixed to the platform. The kinematics of the mobile manipulator, describing velocity constraints imposed on the platform and determining actual position and orientation of the end effector, are represented by a driftless control system with outputs. The motion planning prob...

This paper presents a framework for motion planning with dynamics as hybrid search over the continuous space of feasible motions and the discrete space of a low-dimensional workspace decomposition. Each step of the hybrid search consists of expanding a frontier of regions in the discrete space using cost heuristics as guide followed by sampling-based motion planning to expand a tree of feasible...

A motion planning algorithm is presented for formation control of coordinating multi agents engaged in rigid formation keeping and formation reconfiguration. The multi agent system is separated into geometrically equivalent subsystems for distributed control. The proposed motion planning algorithm generates reference trajectories for each of these subsystems in real-time for online, distributed...