Colloquium "Efficient navigation for any-shape holonomic mobile robots"

Nowadays mobile robots get larger and applicable for industry, with shape no longer circular or convex. Furthermore, overhanging payloads increase the complexity of the resulting footprint. This talk presents a navigation strategy for an holonomic mobile robot with any-shape footprint, developed at Uni Freiburg. Many approaches in robotics approximate the robot with a circle in order to provide an efficient solution by searching in 2D space of positions. This assumption potentially limits the mobility of non-circular robots in narrow passages. Performing a search on a large 3D configuration space is computationally expensive and not suitable for online applications in dynamic environments, where new plans need to be recalculated within a short period of time. We present a compact representation of the discretized free space to compute fast-to-update plans. In particular, we create a graph of valid orientation intervals on top of non-occupied locations on a grid map. Using this representation we furthermore introduce a continuous motion generation approach that computes smooth motions in highly reactive manner and is proven to be asymptotically stable. We show efficiency of our approach both by simulations and experiments using a real holonomic L-shaped robot omniRob by KUKA.