Continuous-Curvature Trajectory Planning

Abstract

Continuous‐curvature paths play an important role in the area of driving robots: as vehicles usually cannot change
the steering angle in zero‐time, real trajectories must not have discontinuities in the curvature profile. Typical continuous‐curvature paths are thus built of straight lines, arcs and clothoids. Due to the geometric nature of clothoids, some questions in the area of trajectory planning are difficult the answer – usually we need approximations here. In this paper we describe a full approach for continuous‐curvature trajectory planning for mobile robots – it covers a maneuver‐based planning with Viterbi optimization and geometric approximations required to construct the respective clothoid trajectories.