Towards Efficient Trajectory Generation for Ground Robots beyond 2D Environment

With the development of robotics, ground robots are no longer limited to planar motion. Passive height variation due to complex terrain and active height control provided by special structures on robots require a more general navigation planning framework beyond 2D. Existing methods rarely considers both simultaneously, limiting the capabilities and applications of ground robots. In this paper, we proposed an optimization-based planning framework for ground robots considering both active and passive height changes on the z-axis. The proposed planner first constructs a penalty field for chassis motion constraints defined in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$ such that the optimal solution space of the trajectory is continuous, resulting in a high-quality smooth chassis trajectory. Also, by constructing custom constraints in the z-axis direction, it is possible to plan trajectories for different types of ground robots which have z-axis degree of freedom. We performed simulations and real-world experiments to verify the efficiency and trajectory quality of our algorithm.

Authors

• Jingping Wang
• Long Xu 0002
• Haoran Fu
• Zehui Meng
• Chao Xu 0001
• Yanjun Cao
• Ximin Lyu
• Fei Gao 0011

Keywords

• Three-dimensional displays
• Limiting
• Automation
• Navigation
• Heuristic algorithms
• Benchmark testing
• Trajectory
• Trajectory Generation
• 2D Environment
• Ground Robots
• Degrees Of Freedom
• Path Planning
• Changes In Height
• Real-world Experiments
• Planning Framework
• Smooth Trajectory
• Types Of Robots
• Cost Function
• Point Cloud
• Penalty Function
• Mathematical Problem
• Trajectory Optimization
• Robot Motion
• Grid Map
• Robot Navigation
• Local Plane
• Safety Assurance
• Safety Constraints
• Rapidly-exploring Random Tree
• Path Search
• Sampling-based Methods
• Final Trajectory
• Original Point Cloud
• Optimization-based Methods
• Unconstrained Optimization Problem
• Indoor Experiments
• Mean Curvature