Collision-free navigation for mobile robots by grouping obstacles

This paper presents a path planning strategy for mobile robot navigation with a laser range finder (LRF) in unknown environments. The strategy takes the view of field into consideration and achieves a safe navigation. The strategy can deal with different obstacles with irregular contours through extracting their features and grouping obstacles rather than approximating obstacles as circular objects with a minimum radius. The strategy was tested with extensive simulations in some typical environments such as "door", U-shaped obstacles and the results revealed that the proposed strategy can achieve an effective procedure for avoiding obstacles while generating smooth paths in an environment with different configurations of multiple obstacles.