Collision-free navigation of multiple unicycle mobile robots
M. Hassan Tanveer, Antonio Sgorbissa, Carmine Tommaso Recchiuto · 2017
Wheeled Robots (WRs) are widely used in many different contexts, and usually they are required to operate in partial or total autonomy. In particular, in a wide range of situations, having the capability of following a predetermined path and avoiding unexpected obstacles can be extremely relevant. On these basis, this paper analyzes an integrated approach for path following and obstacle avoidance applied to unicycle-type robots. The approach is based on the definition of the path to be followed as a curve f(x, y) in space, while obstacles are modeled as Gaussian functions that modify the original function, generating a resulting safe path. The attractiveness of this methodology which makes it look very simple, is that it neither requires the computation of a projection of the robot position on the path, nor does it need to consider a moving virtual target to be tracked. The performances of the proposed approach are analyzed by means of a series of experiments performed in dynamic environments with unicycle-type robots.