Real time obstacle avoidance of mobile robots by hierarchical path planning

Summary form only given. Mobility is essential for an intelligent robot to coexist with humans in a real environment. In the future, mobile robots are expected to be used for various tasks such as autonomous transportation and work in extreme or dangerous environments, etc. In order to realize the above tasks, most research deals with obstacle avoidance as an intelligent function of the robot. A mobile robot system which cooperates with a host computer that manages the complete environmental information is needed. We aim to enhance the obstacle avoidance capability of the mobile robot for an unknown environment and propose a hierarchical path planning algorithm which is based on the communication between the robot and the host computer. The efficiency of the algorithm is confirmed by simulation.