Near Time-optimal Constrained Trajectory Planning on Outdoor Terrain

We present an outdoor terrain planner that finds near optimal trajectories under dynamic and kinematic constraints. The planner can find solutions in close to real time by relaxing some of the assumptions associated with costly rigid body simulation and complex terrain surface interactions. Our system is based on control-driven Proba bilistic Roadmaps and can efficiently find and optimize a near time-minimum trajectory. We present simulated results with artificial environments, as well as a real robot experiment using Segway Robotic Mobile Platform.