DETERMINISTIC PATH PLANNING AND NAVIGATION FOR AN AUTONOMOUS FORK LIFT TRUCK

This paper introduces a novel trajectory planner for flexible material handling with an autonomous fork lift truck. Based on a set of predefined waypoints, a continuous-curvature path is computed by a concatenation of line and polar spline segments. Regarding the nonholonomic constraints of the vehicle, the trajectory as well as an associated speed profile is generated. As flexible path planning is required for this kind of application, trajectory generation is not only limited to the base points of a single route. From a list of multiple predefined routes the proper set of waypoints is chosen for guiding the vehicle to a desired destination. Furthermore, a graph-based routing algorithm enables the combination of different routes for trajectory generation. Following the description of the trajectory planner for single and multiple paths, experimental results with speeds up to 1.7 m/s demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.