Intelligent motion control strategy for a mobile robot in the presence of moving obstacles

A method for the motion control of a mobile robot in the presence of unknown moving obstacles as well as fixed obstacles is presented. The strategy consists of two planning stages: finding a collision-free path in known workspace and planning the velocity profile along the path to avoid a collision with moving obstacles measured through sensors on-line. In the path-planning stage, a neural optimization technique is proposed while considering distance, and safety between a mobile robot and fixed obstacles, and also considering the smoothness of the path of the robot. The optimization is accomplished with selected initial paths which are produced from a regional graph. For planning the velocity profile, the authors present a method of determining the acceleration of the robot by a neural optimization network approach. In this case, the acceleration of the robot is taken as variables of the neural network, and the time derivative equation is derived from the performance index which is the function of the velocity, acceleration, and distances between the obstacles and the robot