Mobile robot navigation with reactive free space estimation

One of the fundamental requirements of an autonomous mobile robot is that it must not collide with obstacles. This paper addresses the problem of controlling an autonomous robot to avoid obstacles for reactive route following navigation. The four-wheeled mobile robot is equipped with three monocular cameras for route following and a range sensor for obstacle avoidance. The equipped robot moves route environments using a reactive navigation method. When an obstacle is detected by a range sensor, the proposed obstacle avoidance method estimates the free space in the route and generates the turning direction vector for heading the robot to the free space which is wider than other space. We executed experiments about the navigation algorithm of the robot with an obstacle including curved path environments in this paper. Through the experiment results in various cases, it is discovered that the proposed method has a better time performance for obstacle avoidance in comparison with other conventional technique.