Integrated Planning and Control for Collision-free Trajectory Generation in 3D Environment with Obstacles

Control of autonomous robots (ARs) is a hot topic over the past three decades, and motion planning is becoming one of the major challenges in AR control. Substantial works have been done for motion planning in 2-dimensional (2D) environments, but planning in 3D complex environments is still an open problem to be investigated. In this paper, we propose a trajectory planning method to plan a high-quality and safe trajectory in 3-dimensional (3D) environments with multiple obstacles. The proposed method is based on the integration of a global optimal 3D path planner with a local planner. First, a hierarchical path planning algorithm is used as a global path planner to compute a near-optimal path formed by a set of waypoints. Second, a local path trajectory planner is designed to track the path computed by the global path planner with multiple constraints of dynamics and environment satisfied. Finally, simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory generation approach subject to the constraints of robot physical limits and environmental requirements.