Using skeletons for nonholonomic path planning among obstacles

The authors describe a practical path planner for nonholonomic robots in environments with obstacles. The planner is based on building a one-dimensional, maximal clearance skeleton through the configuration space of the robot. Rather than using the Euclidean metric to determine clearance, a special metric which captures information about the nonholonomy of the robot is used. The robot navigates from start to goal states by loosely following the skeleton. The resulting paths taken by the robot are of low complexity. Much of the computation can be done offline for a given robot, making for an efficient planner. The focus is on path planning for mobile robots, particularly the planar two-axle car, but the underlying ideas may be applied to planners for other nonholonomic robots