Characterizing Indoor Environment for Robot Navigation Using Velocity Space Approach With Region Analysis and Look-Ahead Verification

Based on the dynamic window approach (DWA) for robot navigation, this paper presents a local reactive method, called DWA_*, for mobile robots to characterize unknown indoor environments for achieving high-speed, smooth, and local-minima-free navigation. The original DWA utilizes only a small part of environmental information to search for a proper motion command in the robot´s motion space. Hence, the robot can be easily driven into a local-minima area and trapped in complex environments. In order to escape from the local-minima area, the proposed DWA_* applies a region analysis technique to filter improper commands, and uses the A_* search algorithm with the look-ahead verification to determine the optimal command that can lead the robot to the best consequence after a designated number of steps. Finally, related simulation and experimental results using laser- and sonar-based mobile robots are presented to illustrate the excellent performance of using DWA_* compared with that of using the original DWA.