Optimal Planar Turns Under Acceleration Constraints
Aneesh Venkatraman, Sanjay P. Bhat · 2006
This paper considers the problem of finding optimal trajectories for a particle moving in a two-dimensional plane from a given initial position and velocity to a specified terminal heading under a magnitude constraint on the acceleration. The cost functional to be minimized is the integral over time of a general non-negative power of the particle's speed. Special cases of such a cost functional include travel time and path length. Unlike previous work on related problems, variations in the magnitude of the velocity vector are allowed. Pontryagin's maximum principle is used to show that the optimal trajectories possess a special property whereby the vector that divides the angle between the velocity and acceleration vectors in a specific ratio, which depends on the cost functional, is a constant. This property is used to obtain the optimal acceleration vector and the parametric equations of the corresponding optimal paths. Solutions of the time-optimal and the length-optimal problems are obtained as special cases