Nonholonomic multibody mobile robots: controllability and motion planning in the presence of obstacles (Q686739)

We consider mobile robots made of a single body (car-like robots) or several bodies (tractors towing several trailers sequentially hooked). These robots are known to be nonholonomic. We first analyze the controllability of such nonholonomic multibody robots. We show that the well-known controllability rank condition theorem is applicable to these robots even when there are inequality constraints on the velocity, in addition to the equality constraints. This allows us to subsume and generalize several controllability results recently published in the robotics literature concerning nonholonomic mobile robots, and to infer several new important results. We then describe an implemented planner inspired by these results. We give experimental results obtained with this planner that illustrate the theoretical results previously developed.