Trajectory Planning for the Shapeshifting of Autonomous Surface Vessels

Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. We present a trajectory planning algorithm for the shapeshifting of reconfigurable modular surface vessels. Each vessel is designed to latch with and unlatch from other vessels, which we aim to use to create dynamic infrastructure, such as on-demand bridges and temporary market squares, in canal environments. Our algorithm generates smooth and collision-free trajectories that the vessels can track to reconfigure their connections. We formulate the trajectory planning problem as Mixed Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) with a B-spline representation. We conceive a physical platform of the reconfigurable modular vessels and, through swimming pool experiments, show the efficacy of our trajectory planning algorithm for the shapeshifting of the vessels.