Concept of equivalent size for tractor-trailer mobile robots and its application to path planning

A tractor-trailer mobile robot (TTMR) is a multi-body system, whose path planning cannot be solved effectively using the path-planning algorithm for single body car-like robots. This paper proposes the concept of the equivalent size (ES) of TTMRs. ES is smaller than system radius, but it can take the place of the system radius to expand obstacles in planning paths and ensure TTRMs without colliding obstacles in tracing paths, that is, with ES the problem of path planning for TTMRs is transformed into path planning for single body robots.