Real-time obstacle avoidance using harmonic potential functions

A formulation of the artificial potential approach to the obstacle avoidance problem for a mobile robot or a manipulator in a known environment is presented. Previous formulations of artificial potentials, for obstacle avoidance, have exhibited local minima in a cluttered environment. To build an artificial potential field, harmonic functions that completely eliminate the local minima even for a cluttered environment were used. The panel method was used to represent arbitrarily shaped obstacles and to derive the potential function over the whole space. Based on this potential function and elegant control strategy for the real-time control of a robot is proposed