Recently, there has been growing interest in developing robotics systems with advanced autonomous capabilities. Among the many open issues in the field, real-time trajectory planning algorithms for Dubins' car (or Dubins' vehicle) has received considerable attention primarily due to its application in robotic and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) path planning applications, but also in ground vehicles applications when they move at constant speed, and most of underwater vehicles applications when they move at constant height.

A Dubins' car is a nonholonomic vehicle which goes only forward at a constant speed and has a lower bounded turning radius, that is, a Dubins' car is basically a unicycle model with fixed linear velocity.

The basic Dubins' problem consists in finding the shortest path from a start pose to a goal pose. A variant of this problem is the 3-Points Dubins Path (3PDP) problem that consist in finding the shortest path through three points for the curvature-constrained forward moving Dubins vehicle. This latter is instrumental for solving other problems of practical applications as the Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DTSP).

The main challenges consist in finding optimal solution to the problem and finding algorithms with low computational effort that make the planning suitable for on-line applications.