Sonar based Autonomous Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV) navigation

In this paper, a sonar based navigation scheme for autonomous automatic guided vehicle (AGV) is proposed considering the physical placement, ranging limits and beam opening angles of sonars. A geometrical modeling of navigation path in an unknown environment is presented. A simple 2D axis transformation is proposed to relate local robot frame with the actual environment. Forward safe path (FSP) and target switching approach (TSA) are proposed for efficient obstacle avoidance and target tracking. FSP simplifies the environment conditions and provides minimum turning path during obstacle avoidance. TSA gives highest priority on the target location during obstacle avoidance and generates minimum distance path towards the target, removing unnecessary turning of the AGV. A scheme for target directional motion is proposed to get minimum turning path towards the target. These methods ensure the avoidance of dasiadead cyclepsila problem and generate dasiaoscillationpsila free navigation. These schemes are successfully implemented on a model of PatrolBottrade from ActivMedia Robotics.