The variable modelling of mobile robot environments

The modelling of a mobile robot environment is mainly motivated first to obtain a map of the free space (in order to compute safe trajectories for the vehicle) and second to provide the control loop with feed-back of obstacle information. Here, the authors only consider the problem of local representations for the displacements of a vehicle with two preoccupations: the environment models have to be adequate for the robot navigation algorithms, and the construction of these models have to be as fast as possible. The study is carried out at two levels: a low level based on the analysis of the free zones of the environment and a high level of obstacle modelling. According to local navigation, the obstacle modelling is based on the artificial potential field method