TIME-OPTIMAL PATHS FOR HIGH-SPEED MANEUVERING

Recent theoretical results have completely solved the problem of deter mining the minimal length path Sor a vehicle moving from an initial co nfiguration to a final configuration. Time-optimal paths for a constan t-speed vehicle are a subset of the minimum length paths. The time-opt imal paths consist of sequences of arcs of circles and straight lines. The Pontryagin Maximum Principle introduces concepts (dural variables , bang-bang solutions, singular solutions, and transversality conditio ns) that provide important insight into tile nature of the time-optima l paths. We have created a module that finds the time-optimal path ft om an initial configuration to a final configuration. We have demonstr ated that the paths can be followed by a large (820-kg) mobile robot.