Full-State Planning of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots via Dynamic Velocity Vector Fields

As a rigid body, the nonholonomic mobile robot contains both states of position and orientation. In order to plan these states simultaneously, this paper investigates the full-state planning problem of nonholonomic mobile robots, in the sense that the robots should reach the specified positions and meanwhile point to the desired orientations at the terminal time. To this end, we propose a velocity vector field which guides the mobile robots to the goal points. Particularly, the dynamics of the robot orientation is brought into the vector field, so that the attitude angle of the robot can converge to the specified value following the orientation dynamics. Furthermore, we study the obstacle avoidance and mutual-robot-collision avoidance by proposing another velocity vector field, which guides the robots moving along the tangential direction of the dangerous areas. Finally, several numerical simulation examples are provided to support the theoretical results.