Goal-directed navigation strategy for a mobile robot under uncertain world knowledge

This paper proposes integrated path planning and collision avoidance for an omni-directional robot. The autonomous mobile robot based on the proposed approach attempts to find a shorter and safety path using the descendent gradient of a navigation function to reach a goal. And we consider some methods to overcome some of the typical problems that may pose to the conventional experiments for robot navigation. In particular, we pick up two types of scenarios. 1) U-shaped deep narrow passage and 2) narrow passage problem between two obstacles. Results of simulations and experiments show that the proposed navigation scheme can effectively construct a path-planning system in the capability of reaching a goal and avoiding obstacles despite possible trapped situations under uncertain world knowledge.