Collision-free navigation of wheeled vehicles by gain switching

In this paper, a collision-free navigation method for multiple wheeled vehicles is investigated. For individual vehicle three navigation variables are transformed from the position and orientation of respective vehicle. These navigation variables are distance of the vehicle from the goal position, angle between the vehicle´s orientation and the vehicle to goal (v-to-g) vector, and the angle between the goal orientation and vehicle to goal (v-to-g) vector. The path tracking control utilizes kinematic representation. Moreover, a switching algorithm is implemented to attack the problem of obstacle avoidance. As the center point of the vehicle is used to navigate the vehicle to the goal position, two more points are used for the obstacle avoidance. These points are on the left front, and right front of the vehicle. Depending upon the position of the obstacle with respect to these points, the closest point to the obstacle gets activated and control design takes the parameters according to that point. The main advantage of this approach is the obstacle avoidance by keeping the safe distance from the closest point of the vehicle to the obstacle. The effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is demonstrated by simulations.