A "divide and conquer" strategy based on situations to achieve reactive collision avoidance in troublesome scenarios

This paper addresses reactive collision avoidance for robots that move in arduous environments (i.e., very dense, complex and cluttered). To achieve this goal, the technique simplifies the difficulty of the navigation by a divide and conquer strategy, which is based on identifying navigational situations and applying the corresponding motion laws. The state of the art in reactive navigation still presents classic limitations such as trap situations due to U-shape obstacles, difficulty to achieve motion among very close obstacles, to obtain oscillation-free and stable motion, to move over directions far from the goal direction or towards the obstacles, or to tune the heuristic or internal parameters. This paper presents a method that overcomes all these limitations. As a result, navigation with this method is successfully achieved in scenarios where existing techniques present a high degree of difficulty to navigate. Outstanding navigation results are reported using a wheelchair vehicle. A discussion and comparison with existing techniques is provided.