Abstract
Human Support Robot (HSR), a safe and lightweight assistant robot with large range of tasks, has been developed to support disabled or aged people and their caregivers. In order for HSR to move around one's house autonomously, its path planning process needs to generate a path which can go through narrow spaces without collision with surroundings. However, determining such paths is a difficult task for wheeled robots with non-holonomic constraints like HSR because the path planning process needs to carefully detect collisions considering configurations of the robot while keeping smoothness of the path. To address this issue, we proposed a path planning method which is based on path optimization using three imaginary springs. With the proposed methods, collision-free smooth paths going through narrow spaces were generated in real time, and the HSR prototype was able to move through narrow spaces smoothly.
