Safe Interval Path Planning and Flatness-Based Control for Navigation of a Mobile Robot among Static and Dynamic Obstacles

Abstract

In this work we study a navigation problem for a nonholonomic differential drive robot operating in the environment with static and dynamic obstacles. We present a multi-phase approach to solve it, which is based on heuristic search to tackle the trajectory planning problem and specific methods of the control theory to solve the path following problem. Results of the experimental evaluation show that the suggested controller is one order of magnitude faster than the widely used in robotics Model-Predictive Control (MPC) and is capable of accurately following the reference trajectory. On the planning side we show that the suggested planner is scalable and is able to plan in reasonable time.