Dynamic steering control of conventionally-steered mobile robots

An algorithm is presented for dynamically steering an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) along a collision-free path to a goal using local feedback information. A two-level navigation algorithm is presented in which a subgoal selection algorithm (SSA) generates visible subgoals to be pursued by the steering control algorithm (SCA). The authors focus on the SCA. In particular, a general feedback scheme is developed for dynamically steering an ARM to a visible goal in the local obstacle-free space identified by the SSA. The detailed implementation of the SCA for a conventionally steered AMR (CAMR) is presented. Simulation results are presented which demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined SSA-SCA feedback scheme