Feasible Trajectory Planning Algorithm for a Skid-Steered Tracked Mobile Robot Subject to Skid and Slip Phenomena

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach for the motion planning of a constrained skid-steered tracked mobile robot under the hypothesis of non-negligible skid and slip phenomena. Operating environment is firstly discretized with a finite dimensional grid. Then, a weighted graph is defined whose nodes are the above mentioned grid points, and whose arcs denote the trajectory segments. A modified shortest path search algorithm is then proposed to find a trajectory, in terms of succession of arcs, connecting starting and ending nodes. Trajectory feasibility is guaranteed by recurring to set-based arguments. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, some numerical examples are finally discussed.