Forward Passageway based collision-free target tracking for mobile robot with local sensing

This paper proposes a new forward passageway (FP) based real-time collision-free target tracking approach for a mobile robot with local sensing. After the position of the target is estimated and localized in robot coordinate system through the combination of vision system and encoder, the sonar information and the target position are converted to a uniform environment model framework called decision-making space. Based on the space, a FP based decision-making is given to endow the robot with the ability to avoid possible obstacles and track the target in unknown environments. Experiment results show the validity of the proposed approach.