Docking task for nonholonomic mobile robots

This paper presents a framework for precise parking for nonholonomic mobile robots: the docking task. It consists in following a planned trajectory and reaching a docking configuration, defined relatively to the environment. The trajectory is deformed in order to reach the docking configuration, to avoid obstacles and to keep the nonholonomic constraints satisfied. A generic framework to compute the docking configuration is presented. Then we give the principle of a nonholonomic path deformation method that was used to deform the planned trajectory towards the docking configuration. This framework has been tested on a real robot with a trailer in a realistic scenario