Tangential Closest Gap based (TCG) reactive obstacle avoidance navigation for cluttered environments

This paper addresses a new obstacle avoidance technique for mobile robots moving in dense and complex environments. Our approach is to integrate two concepts: The Closest Gap (CG) for fetching and analyzing openings surrounding the robot and the Tangential Escape (TE) for reactive obstacle avoidance navigation. This combination results in faster and less oscillatory robot trajectories than the well known approaches designed for complex scenarios, e.g. the Nearness-Diagram Navigation methods. Motion commands are derived with proven stability in the Lyapunov sense for the control system. The power of our method is demonstrated by simulation and experimental results.