Constrained Path Optimization with Bézier Curve Primitives

Authors

Ji-Wung Choi, Kalevi Huhtala

Year

2014

Conference Paper

Algorithm

Bézier motion primitives

Source

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Identifiers

DOI 10.1109/IROS.2014.6942568

Abstract¶

This article suggests a novel path planning algorithm for a non-holonomic wheeled vehicle operating in a semi-structured environment. The first step of the algorithm is to compute offline a finite set of feasible motions connecting discrete robot states to construct a search graph. The motion primitives based on Bézier curves are generated by solving the constrained optimization problem (COP). Applying A∗ on the search graph produces paths in the form of a sequence of the primitives. Although the sequence is drivable and suboptimal, we perform online path smoothing to remove the jerky or extraneous motions. The post-procedure is done by using a gradient based method to solve another COP. The numerical simulations show remarkable performance improvement in the constrained path optimization by applying our algorithm, compared to other existing works.

Summary¶

Builds a graph of feasible Bézier motion primitives for nonholonomic vehicles using offline constrained optimization, searches it with A*, and smooths the resulting path through online gradient-based optimization.