Showing papers by "Efstathios Bakolas published in 2009"

On the generation of nearly optimal, planar paths of bounded curvature and bounded curvature gradient

Abstract: We present a numerically efficient scheme to generate a family of path primitives that can be used to construct paths that take into consideration point-wise constraints on both the curvature and its derivative. The statement of the problem is a generalization of the Dubins problem to account for more realistic vehicle dynamics. The problem is solved by appropriate concatenations of line segments, circular arcs and pieces of clothoids, which are the path primitives in our scheme. Our analysis reveals that the use of clothoid segments, in addition to line segments and circular arcs, for path generation introduces significant changes on issues such as path admissibility and length minimality, when compared with the standard Dubins problem.

The asymmetric sinistral/dextral Markov-Dubins problem

Abstract: We consider a variation of the classical Markov-Dubins problem dealing with curvature-constrained, shortest paths in the plane with prescribed initial and terminal positions and tangents, when the lower and upper bounds of the curvature are not necessarily equal. The motivation for this problem stems from vehicle navigation applications when the vehicle may be biased in taking turns at a particular direction due to hardware failures or environmental conditions. We employ optimal control to characterize the structure of the shortest path and we resort to geometric techniques to provide sufficient conditions for optimality of the resulting path.