Mobile robots at your fingertip: Bezier curve on-line trajectory generation for supervisory control

A new interfacing method is presented to control mobile robot(s) in a supervised manner. Mobile robots often provide global position information to an operator. This research describes a method whereby the operator controls a mobile robot(s) using his finger or stylus via a touchpad or touch screen interface. Using a mapping between the robot's operational site and the input device, a human user can provide routing information for the mobile robot. Two algorithms have been developed to create the robot trajectory from the operator's input. Information regarding numerous path points is generated when the operator moves his finger/stylus. To prune away meaningless point information, a simple but powerful significant points extracting algorithm is developed. The resulting significant points are used as waypoints. An on-line piecewise cubic Bezier curves (PCBC) trajectory generation algorithm is presented to create a smooth trajectory for these significant points. As the method is based on distance and not on time, the velocity of mobile robot can be controlled easily within its allowable dynamic range. The PCBC trajectory can also be modified on the fly. Simulation results are presented to verify these newly developed methods.