Real-Time Path Planning for Mobile Robots

A new on-line real-time approach with obstacle avoidance for mobile robots moving in an uncertain environment has been proposed and implemented. With the integration of global planning and local planning, this path planning approach is based on polar coordinates in which the desirable direction angle is taken into consideration as an optimization index. Detecting unknown obstacles with local feedback information by robot's sensor system, this approach orients the desirable direction of mobile robot so as to generate local sub-goal in every planning window. As a result, the difference between real direction angle and desirable direction angle of robot motion steers the mobile robot to detour collisions and advance toward the target without stopping to re-plan a path when new sensor data become available. This approach is not only simple and flexible, but also overcomes flaws of global planning and local planning. The effectiveness, feasibility, real-time performance, optimization capability, high precision and perfect stability are demonstrated by means of simulation examples.