Online Generation of Collision-Free Trajectories in Dynamic Environments

2026-02-28

AI Summary

This work proposes an online trajectory generation method based on piecewise quintic/quartic splines to address the challenge of converting arbitrary geometric paths into kinematically feasible and collision-free trajectories in dynamic environments. The approach explicitly enforces jerk constraints and supports real-time replanning under high-frequency goal updates. By integrating dynamic environment perception and a responsive adaptation mechanism, it guarantees collision avoidance within finite time while permitting bounded deviations from the original path. Both simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that the method outperforms existing approaches in trajectory smoothness, computational efficiency, and real-time performance, achieving stable operation in human-in-the-loop dynamic scenarios with target update rates up to 1 kHz.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

In this paper, we present an online method for converting an arbitrary geometric path represented by a sequence of states, generated by any planner (e.g., sampling-based planners like RRT or PRM, search-based planners like ARA*, etc.), into a corresponding kinematically feasible, jerk-limited trajectory. The method generates a sequence of quintic/quartic splines that can be discretized at a user-specified control rate, and then streamed to a low-level robot controller. Our approach enables real-time adaptation to newly captured changes in the environment. It can also be re-invoked at any time instance to generate a new trajectory from the robot's current to a desired target state or sequence of states. We can guarantee that the trajectory will remain collision-free for a certain amount of time in dynamic environments, while allowing bounded geometric deviation from the original path. The kinematic constraints are taken into account, including limited jerk. We validate the approach in a comparative simulation study against the competing method, demonstrating favorable behavior w.r.t. smoothness, computational time, and real-time performance, particularly in scenarios with frequent changes of target states (up to 1 [kHz]). Experiments on a real robot demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used in real-world scenarios including human presence.

Problem

• collision-free trajectory
• dynamic environments
• online generation
• kinematic constraints
• real-time adaptation

Innovation

• online trajectory generation
• jerk-limited trajectory
• collision-free planning
• dynamic environments
• real-time replanning