Admissible velocity propagation: Beyond quasi-static path planning for high-dimensional robots

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to addressing the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler steps: first, a path is found in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints is found. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step must be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints during the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm – Admissible Velocity Propagation – which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path, while respecting the system’s kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.