Elliptical trajectories for non-holonomic vehicles

A manipulation device can be installed on a mobile robot. In this case, the robot should be able to approach the objects to be manipulated from a given direction, suitable for this purpose. If the kinematic structure of the robot is not holonomic, this problem can be very hard to solve. In this paper, it is described a navigation algorithm capable of driving a car-like robot (i.e. characterized by slow steering motion with a minimum radius of curvature) to a given point with a given orientation, whatever its initial position and orientation.