This paper develops a new approach for robot motion planning and control in obstacle-laden environments that is inspired by fundamentals of fluid mechanics. For motion planning, we propose a novel transformation between motion space, with arbitrary obstacles of random sizes and shapes, and an obstacle-free planning space with geodesically-varying distances and constrained transitions. We then obtain robot desired trajectory by A* searching over a uniform grid distributed over the planning space. We show that implementing the A* search over the planning space can generate shorter paths when compared to the existing A* searching over the motion space. For trajectory tracking, we propose an MPC-based trajectory tracking control, with linear equality and inequality safety constraints, enforcing the safety requirements of planning and control.
@article{arxiv.2309.16874,
title = {Sandwich Approach for Motion Planning and Control},
author = {Mohamadreza Ramezani and Hossein Rastgoftar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16874},
year = {2024}
}