Fast Four-Stage Local Motion Planning Method for Mobile Robot

Mobile robot local motion planning is responsible for the fast and smooth obstacle avoidance, which is one of the main indicators for evaluating mobile robots’ navigation capabilities. Current methods formulate local motion planning as a unified problem; therefore it cannot satisfy the real-time requirement on the platform with limited computing ability. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a fast local motion planning method that can reach a planning frequency of 500 Hz on a low-cost CPU. The proposed method decouples the local motion planning as the front-end path searching and the back-end optimization. The front-end is composed of the environment topology analysis and graph searching. The back-end includes dynamically feasible trajectory generation and optimal trajectory selection. Different from the popular methods, the proposed method decomposes the local motion planning into four sub-modules, each of which aims to solve one problem. Combining four sub-modules, the proposed method can obtain the complete local motion planning algorithm which can fastly generate a smooth and collision-free trajectory. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the ability to obtain the smooth, dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectory and the speed of the planning is fast.