Trajectory planning for kinematically controllable underactuated mechanical systems

We develop trajectory planners for a class of second-order underactuated mechanical systems called kinematically controllable systems. For kinematically controllable systems, the problem of planning fast collision-free trajectories can be decoupled into the computationally simpler problems of path planning for a kinematic system followed by time-optimal time scaling. This paper describes efficient path planners using randomized algorithms and dynamic programming to solve the path planning problem for the kinematic system. The resulting kinematic paths axe time scaled to produce fast trajectories.