Flatness and small-time controllability of multibody mobile robots: Application to motion planning

Most nonholonomic path planning algorithms in the presence of obstacles use a local planner, that is, a method returning feasible paths between pairs of configurations without taking obstacles into account. To ensure converge nce of the global method, however, the local planner has to account for sma ll-time controllability: the length of the path joining two configurations has to tend toward zero with the distance between these configurations. In this paper, we present such a Local method for a robot towing n trailers, b ased on differential flatness and significantly more efficienct than former methods.