From Reeds and Shepps to ContinuousCurvature Paths Most path planners for carlike robots compute Reeds and Shepp pathsu0027u0027 made up of line segments connected with circular arcs. Such paths have a discontinuous curvature that makes them difficult to track (curvature is related to the orientation of the front wheels). The purpose of this paper is to present one of the first path planner for carlike robots that computes paths with continuouscurvature and upperbounded curvature derivative (curvature derivative is related to the steering velocity). The approach presented herein relies upon a steering method, i.e. an algorithm that computes paths without taking into account the obstacles of the environment, which is then embedded within a general path planning scheme in order to deal with the obstacles and thus solve the full problem. The paths computed are made up of line segments, circular arcs and clothoid arcs.

A Feedback Motion Plan for Vehicles with Bounded Curvature Constraints The use of a feedback motion plan instead of the decoupled scheme consisting of separate plan and control phases can facilitate the task of proving the properties of an autonomous system. The advantage of using a feedback motion plan is the possibility to validate the whole plan offline before its execution, which means that trajectories having different initial states can be tested simultaneously. In this paper, we formulate a feedback motion plan based on the extension of the wavefront expansion to the case of vehicles having bounded curvature. Additionally, the use of a transition function and a Gaussian filter limits undesired oscillations in the resultant trajectories. The method is suitable for both single goal missions and path following. The paper illustrates the algorithm for the generation of the plan and presents simulation data containing example trajectories and analysis of tuning parameters. Finally, future developments are discussed.