A novel potential field method for obstacle avoidance and path planning of mobile robot

This paper presents a novel artificial potential field method for obstacle avoidance and path planning of mobile robots. By analyzing the shortcoming of the artificial potential field methods for robot path planning, we propose an obstacle avoidance method based on gravity chain. Suppose that there is a rubber band which connects with the beginning and the ending in the obstacle potential field space. As the rubber band will be the role of potential field power, we can build a model to simulate the shape of the rubber band. Then this method will generate a steer angle tangent to the rubber band instead of the angle of artificial potential field. By putting effective obstacle avoidance information into potential field through gravity chain, we solve the problems that the artificial potential field method often converges to local minima, as well as it hardly reach the ending and oscillatory movement. The Simulation results show that the method proposed is correct and effective.