A tractor-trailer robot consists of a carlike tractor towing a passive trailer. Due to its highly nonholonomic nature, the kinematics of this type of robot are complicated and difficult to compute. We present exact closed-form solutions for the kinematic parameters of a tractor-trailer robot and use them to construct an exact and efficient motion planner in the absence of obstacles. This local planner can be employed in a probabilistic global planner, which allows us t o plan motions in the presence of obstacles. constraints. We give closed-form solutions for its kinematic parameters and show how we can explicitly express its configuration at any given time instant. This makes it possible to construct an exact motion planning algorithm for the tractor-trailer robot in the absence of obstacles, which is described in Section 3. Then in Section 4 we briefly discuss how this local planner can be employed in a probabilistic framework, which allows us to plan the motion of a tractor-trailer robot in the presence of obstacles. Finally, in Section 5 we give some conclusions and indicate open problems and directions of future work.
For the standard 1-trailer configuration an exact local motion planner was presented in REF .
Exact motion planning for tractor-trailer robots
Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Engineering Computer Science