Efficient motion planners for nonholonomic mobile robots

Deals with the problem of motion planning for a car-like robot (i.e. a nonholonomic mobile robot whose turning radius is lower bounded). The authors present a fast and exact planner based upon recursive subdivisions of a collision-free path generated by a lower-level geometric planner which ignores the motion constraints. The resultant trajectory is optimized to give a path which is of near-minimal length in its homotopy class. The claims of high speed are supported by experimental results for several implementations which assume different geometric models of the robot