Towards navigating mobile robot to an arbitary goal position and angle

Mobile robot navigation has been active area for research. Most of the existing mobile robot navigation methods consider a goal position in 2D C-Space which does not include the final facing angle. The final facing angle (called heading hence forth), becomes very crucial while navigating robot to many successive goal positions. This paper proposes a reactive method towards navigating a holonomic or non-holonomic mobile robot to reach a goal position with given heading. The algorithm proceeds in evaluating an optimization function over discretized dynamic linear and angular velocity ranges, and selecting appropriate velocities. The method extends the existing Dynamic Window approaches to incorporate an additional goal parameter i.e. the final heading angle. The novelty of the proposed method is in considering heading as angle in 3D C-Space, which enables robot to reach final heading angle. We provide simulation results for non-holonomic robot to validate the method.