Fast, continuous state path smoothing to improve navigation accuracy

Autonomous navigation in real-world industrial environments is a challenging task in many respects. One of the key open challenges is fast planning and execution of trajectories to reach arbitrary target positions and orientations with high accuracy and precision, while taking into account non-holonomic vehicle constraints. In recent years, lattice-based motion planners have been successfully used to generate kinematically and kinodynamically feasible motions for non-holonomic vehicles. However, the discretized nature of these algorithms induces discontinuities in both state and control space of the obtained trajectories, resulting in a mismatch between the achieved and the target end pose of the vehicle. As endpose accuracy is critical for the successful loading and unloading of cargo in typical industrial applications, automatically planned paths have not be widely adopted in commercial AGV systems. The main contribution of this paper addresses this shortcoming by introducing a path smoothing approach, which builds on the output of a lattice-based motion planner to generate smooth drivable trajectories for non-holonomic industrial vehicles. In real world tests presented in this paper we demonstrate that the proposed approach is fast enough for online use (it computes trajectories faster than they can be driven) and highly accurate. In 100 repetitions we achieve mean end-point pose errors below 0.01 meters in translation and 0.002 radians in orientation. Even the maximum errors are very small: only 0.02 meters in translation and 0.008 radians in orientation.