This paper presents first attempts at a method for searching for time-optimal trajectories for a general model of mobile robots that includes Dubins and Reeds-Shepp cars, differential-drive robots, and omnidirectional robots as special cases. The paper takes as a starting point recent results by the authors that describe necessary conditions on the trajectories, based on Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. These necessary conditions reduce the problem of finding an optimal trajectory between start and goal to a few one-dimensional search problems. This search is not formally guaranteed to find a near-optimal trajectory if the sampling of the search space is not fine enough, but comparison to existing analytical results for specific systems, and a complete numerical search over trajectories with only a few control switches, demonstrates effectiveness of the method.

We study a general class of single linear recursions and the properties of their expansions by analyzing the structures of the recursions. We show that the expansions of a linear recursion of this class are very regular in that the variable connections are heavily shared and change periodically with respect to the expansions. The variable connections can be precisely characterized as static bindings and chain connections. We conclude that a single linear recursion under our assumptions either is bounded or can be expressed as chain recursions. This study contributes to query processing, because it provides the basis for rule compilation as a general and powerful technique for query processing. Combined with query information, the expansion properties of the recursion provide optimized query-processing plans.>

The authors study the compilation and efficient processing of asynchronous chain recursions and show that many complex function-free recursions, which may contain single or multiple linear recursive rules, nonlinear recursive rules, mutually recursive rules, and multiple-level recursions, can be compiled to asynchronous chain recursions. The study on the compilation methods, the simplification of compiled formulas, and the query-processing techniques shows that asynchronous chain recursions can be compiled to relatively simple compiled formulas and processed efficiently using transitive closure query-processing methods.>