Reactive Planning based Control for Mobile Robots in Obstacle-Cluttered Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reactive planning control strategy for mobile robots that enables collision-free navigation in obstacle-rich environments with limited environment information.

Contribution

It develops a novel reactive planning based control strategy combining trajectory modification and adaptive tracking for collision avoidance.

Findings

The proposed RPCS effectively avoids obstacles in simulations.

Numerical examples demonstrate the strategy's robustness and efficiency.

The method operates with partial environment information.

Abstract

This paper addresses the motion control problem for mobile robots in obstacle-cluttered environments. The mobile robot has partial environment information only, and aims to move from an initial position to a target position without collisions. For this purpose, a reactive planning based control strategy (RPCS) is proposed. First, the initial and target positions are connected as a reference trajectory. Then, a reactive planning strategy (RPS) is developed to ensure the collision avoidance by modifying the reference trajectory locally based on the partial environment information. Next, an adaptive tracking control strategy (ATCS) is proposed to track the reference trajectory with potentially local modifications via the discretization techniques. Finally, the RPS and ATCS are combined to establish the RPCS, whose efficacy and advantages are illustrated by numerical examples.