Design of switching path-planning control for obstacle avoidance of mobile robot

Generally speaking, the mobile robot is capable of sensing its surrounding environment, interpreting the sensed information to obtain the knowledge of its location and the environment, and planning a real-time trajectory to reach the object. In this process, the issue of obstacle avoidance is a fundamental topic to be challenged. Thus, a switching path-planning control scheme is designed without detailed environmental information, large memory size, and heavy computation burden in this study for the obstacle avoidance of a mobile robot. In this scheme, the robot can gradually approach its object according to the motion tracking mode, obstacle avoidance mode, self-rotation mode, and robot state selection designed by learning and expert rules for enhancing the tracking speed and adapting to different environments. The effectiveness of the proposed adaptive path-planning control scheme is verified by numerical simulations and experimental results of a differential-driving mobile robot under the possible occurrence of obstacle shapes. (C) 2011 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.