A comparative study of smooth path planning for a mobile robot considering kinematic constraints

In this study, a smooth path planning approach is proposed and compared to path smoothing for an autonomous mobile robot. Classical start-goal oriented path planning algorithms find paths that do not consider robot kinematic constraints. These paths may have sharp turns at some intersections. When mobile robot follows such a path, it stops, reorients the wheels and speeds up again. So the robots waste much power and time. In these cases, path smoothing can be used to minimize sharp turns. But, it may result unnecessarily long paths. A concurrent path planning and smoothing is proposed for mobile robots with kinematic constraints. Experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.