Obstacle avoidance and positioning control of autonomous mobile robots

Summary form only given. This paper analyzes the motion and control of differential-type mobile robots for autonomous position control and obstacle avoidance. Two control methods are proposed so that the robot autonomously controls its motion and achieves a desired position without colliding with obstacles that could be present in arbitrary positions inside the working area. For both methods the robot is able to avoid obstacles and achieve the desired position, but the trajectories described by the robot are different for both control methods. Considering that the position of the obstacles are not known in advance, trajectory planning is not possible. Therefore a trajectory pruning technique is proposed and implemented after the first run of the robot, to shorten the trajectory of the robot. This pruning technique eliminates those parts of the original trajectory through which the robot passes two or more times. The effectiveness and generalizability of the control methods and trajectory pruning technique are verified experimentally and by computer simulation for different initial positions, different desired positions and different number and locations of obstacles.