Corridor navigation and wall-following stable control for sonar-based mobile robots

In this paper, a mobile robot control law for corridor navigation and wall-following, based on sonar and odometric sensorial information is proposed. The control law allows for stable navigation avoiding actuator saturation. The posture information of the robot travelling through the corridor is estimated by using odometric and sonar sensing. The control system is theoretically proved to be asymptotically stable. Obstacle avoidance capability is added to the control system as a perturbation signal. A state variables estimation structure is proposed that fuses the sonar and odometric information. Experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed control system. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.