This paper proposes the use of piecewise Cn smooth curve for mobile-base motion planning and control, coined Timed-Elastic Smooth Curve (TESC) planner. Based on a Timed-Elastic Band, the problem is defined so that the trajectory lies on a spline in SE(2) with non-vanishing n-th derivatives at every point. Formulated as a multi-objective nonlinear optimization problem, it allows imposing soft constraints such as collision-avoidance, velocity, acceleration and jerk limits, and more. The planning process is realtime-capable allowing the robot to navigate in dynamic complex scenarios. The proposed method is compared against the state-of-the-art in various scenarios. Results show that trajectories generated by the TESC planner have smaller average acceleration and are more efcient in terms of total curvature and pseudo-kinetic energy while being produced with more consistency than state-of-the-art planners do.

This work was partially supported by the EU H2020 project LOGIMATIC (H2020-Galileo-2015-1-687534), and by the Spanish State Research Agency through projects EB-SLAM (DPI2017-89564-P) and the Mar´ıa de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (MDM-2016-0656).

Trabajo presentado en la IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), celebrada en Macao (China), del 3 al 8 de noviembre de 2019