Vehicle path specification by a sequence of straight lines

A path-description method that uses a sequence of straight lines with coordinate transformations is presented. This concept is hardware-independent and may be applied to any kind of vehicle. A local vehicle-trajectory-control algorithm is used both for determining the transient portions of each vehicle trajectory and for keeping the vehicle moving along a given directed straight line. A vehicle-control command-system, MITCHI, is one realization of the idea and is introduced. The MITCHI command-system has been implemented on self-contained Yamabico mobile robots. Several design features, such as status transition, fast/slow command execution, and velocity control, as well as simulation results, are described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>