Bridging the Gap Between Safety and Real-Time Performance in Receding-Horizon Trajectory Design for Mobile Robots

Understand

To operate with limited sensor horizons in unpredictable environments, autonomous robots use a receding-horizon strategy to plan trajectories, wherein they execute a short plan while creating the next plan.

• However, creating safe, dynamically-feasible trajectories in real time is challenging; and, planners must ensure persistent feasibility, meaning a new trajectory is always available before the previous one has finished executing.
• Existing approaches make a tradeoff between model complexity and planning speed, which can require sacrificing guarantees of safety and dynamic feasibility.
• This work presents the Reachability-based Trajectory Design (RTD) method for trajectory planning.