Intelligent mobile robot path planning with fuzzy system approaches

The path planning problem for intelligent mobile robots involves two main subproblems, i.e., the repesentation of task environment including obstacles and the development of a strategy to determine a collision-free route. New approaches are developed to solve these subproblems. The first subproblem is solved using the fuzzy system approach where obstacles are represented by fuzzy half planes. The other subproblem is overcome through the use of a strategy selector, which chooses the best strategy among a few, to be used for determination of a collision-free route. This approach is able to draw on the strengths of different strategies under different situations. Based on the fuzzy approach for world representation, two existing strategies are modified for the dynamic enviornment case. Simulation examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches