Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance in Mobile Robots

Download or read book Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance in Mobile Robots written by Saurabh Sarkar and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis describes a novel path planning approach and a new obstacle avoidance technique for mobile robots. The path planning approach is based on dynamic programming and can be used for either discrete way point navigation or continuous path tracking. The obstacle avoidance algorithm described here is similar to the virtual force field concepts used in mobile robots using sonar to avoid obstacles but it has been modified to be effectively used for a mobile robot with a laser scanner. The lane following technique uses a modified version of virtual force field concept suited for vision based navigation. For effective detection of lane markers under various lighting conditions this approach utilizes the ratio of colors to do color lane detection. The thesis finally describes the use of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for mobile robots. This agent based system effectively manages distributed AI components across the network in the mobile robot and also resolves conflicts. The results of this analysis were tested in the 2007 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (www.igvc.org) with acceptable outcomes. Further refinements have been made in preparation for the 2008 competition. The significance of this work is that it is a step toward autonomous intelligent vehicles that could be significantly safer than manually driven vehicles.