Continuous-Time Line-Of-Sight Constrained Trajectory Planning for 6-Degree of Freedom Systems

Abstract

Perception algorithms are ubiquitous in modern autonomy stacks, providing necessary environmental information to operate in the real world. Many of these algorithms depend on the visibility of keypoints, which must remain within the robot’s line-of-sight (LoS), for reliable operation. This paper tackles the challenge of maintaining LoS on such keypoints during robot movement. We propose a novel method that addresses these issues by ensuring applicability to various sensor footprints, adaptability to arbitrary nonlinear system dynamics, and constant enforcement of LoS throughout the robot's path. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves significantly reduced LoS violation and runtime compared to existing state-of-the-art methods in several representative and challenging scenarios.