A time-scaling method for near-time-optimal control of an omni-directional robot along specified paths

This paper proposes a time-scaling method to determine the near-time-optimal movement of an omnidirectional mobile robot along a given reference path. With this strategy, the positions of the trajectory after scaling are the same as the original ones such that the geometric path constraints are not violated. However, the velocities and the accelerations are adjusted to meet the dynamical constraints and to minimize the traveling time. When determining the time-scaling function, a cubic spline interpolation technique is used, in which control points for interpolation are determined simultaneously by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method based on the integration of a time-scaling function. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, the results of a simulation example is illustrated.