A Kinematics-Based Method for Time-Optimal Control of an Omni-Directional Robot

The main goal of this study is to investigate the time-optimal control problem of an omni-directional mobile robot between two configurations. In the proposed method, this problem is formulated and solved as a constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) one. During the optimization process, the count of control steps is fixed initially and the sampling period is treated as a variable to be determined. The goal is to minimize the sampling period such that it is below a specific minimum value, which is set in advance considering the accuracy of discretization. To generate initial feasible solutions of the NLP problem, a systematic approach is also proposed. Since different initial feasible solutions can be generated, the optimization process of the NLP problem can be started from many different points to find the optimal solution. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, simulation and experimental results are included for illustration.