PWTO: A Heuristic Approach for Trajectory Optimization in Complex Terrains

Understand

This paper considers a trajectory planning problem for a robot navigating complex terrains, which arises in applications ranging from autonomous mining vehicles to planetary rovers.

• The problem seeks to find a low-cost dynamically feasible trajectory for the robot.
• The problem is challenging as it requires solving a non-linear optimization problem that often has many local minima due to the complex terrain.
• To address the challenge, we propose a method called Pareto-optimal Warm-started Trajectory Optimization (PWTO) that attempts to combine the benefits of graph search and trajectory optimization, two very different approaches to planning.