Motion planning and control for Hilare pulling a trailer

This paper deals with motion planning and control for mobile robots. The va rious components of an integrated architecture for the mobile robot Hilare pulling a trailer are presented. The nonholonomic path planner is based on an original steering method accounting for the small-time controllability o f the system, Then the path is transformed into a trajectory by including t he dynamical constraints of the system (bounded velocity and bounded accele ration). Finally motion control is addressed: thanks to a geometric transfo rmation introducing a virtual robot, we show how to reduce the problem to a classical approach of trajectory tracking for a mobile robot moving only f orward. Experimental results include two types of robot-trailer connection systems.