Navigation system for a mobile robot in an unstructured environment

The work described in this paper is based on the displacement management system of a mobile robot presented in our previous paper (1993). The displacement of a mobile robot requires the determination of a path for obstacle avoidance; a knowledge of the environment is necessary. Until recently, most existing methods used either a global path method for driving the robot from its current position to the destination position by using known information on the environment, or a method researching the path that the robot has to follow during its displacement based on the instantaneous information obtained by the robot sensors. In this paper we describe the methods which combine these two strategies and use the potential fields to determine a path