Motion planning for mobile robots using the Collidable Velocity Obstacles method

The collision-free motion planning for mobile robots is a challenging task in dynamic environment. There are situations when the robot has no chance to select a velocity vector that would cause no collision in the next steps of the motion. Most of the motion planning algorithms for mobile robots cannot generate an appropriate solution for that problem. At the autonomous systems, the only acceptable solution in this situation is emergency braking which could cause huge damage between the robot and the obstacle. The main focus of this paper is to introduce a novel motion planning method for mobile robots that could generate a velocity vector for the robot that would cause the least damage between the robot and the environment. It can be assumed that the obstacles in the environment are passive, and low damage collisions would be attempted only when avoidance is not possible at the sampling time. If the robot has an opportunity to select a velocity vector from the Reachable Avoidance Velocities set, then a cost-function-based algorithm can be used considering different aspects.